


The Three Sisters

by mumuinc



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Child Abuse, Eventual Harry Potter/Sirius Black because that's how I roll, Female Harry Potter, Gen, Not Snape Friendly, Petunia Evans Redemption Arc, Rule 63, Slice of Life, Time Travel, long and incredibly slow burning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:16:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29799375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: Aunt Petunia gasped her pain out against Holly’s clammy neck even as she turned, her head lolling, to glare hatefully at Bellatrix. “You will not take her. My sister—““—is dead, little muggle,” said Bellatrix. “As will you if you do not give us Potter.”Holly’s heart constricted for the space of half a heartbeat. Aunt Petunia did not want her. She’d gotten Uncle Vernon killed. She’d brought the war to their doorstep. She’d—“Over my dead body, you stupid witch!” Aunt Petunia gasped, her arms convulsively twitching around Holly’s shoulders, her nails digging into her skin. “You’ve killed my sister, my husband… I—I won’t let you kill my niece too!”Bellatrix laughed loudly, a loud maniacal cackle that seemed to fill Holly’s world with fire and brimstone. “On your head be it.Avada Kedavra!”
Relationships: Harry Potter & Lily Evans Potter, Petunia Evans Dursley & Harry Potter
Comments: 82
Kudos: 265





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Graphic child abuse

The sound of the front door slamming rang through the mess that was the Dursley living room as Petunia, Dudley and Vernon stood, somewhat shell-shocked while Holly tried, as best as she could to curb the way the grimace on her face trying to morph into a smug smile that threatened to overtake her features as the Dursley family attempted to wrap their heads around the news they’d just received.

_War in the horizon._

The words had been somberly uttered by a soft-spoken Hestia Jones, who’d taken on the unfortunate task of notifying the Dursleys that they needed to be taken into protective custody lest the dark forces under Voldemort’s command try to attack them too the minute Holly turned seventeen. Aunt Petunia looked nearly transparent when Hestia Jones told them that the terrible accidents that had been all over the evening news were the not accidents but the result of Death Eaters rampaging against muggles. Uncle Vernon’s moustache was still quivering and his thick neck pink from trying to shout his disdain for Holly’s ‘lot’. Hestia had Silenced him rather judiciously the minute he started trying to talk over her and the spell hadn’t quite worn off yet. Dudley was looking up the stairs, where Holly stood, watching as the Weasley twins, who’d thought it’d be a huge laugh to accompany Hestia, wreaked a bit of havoc through Aunt Petunia’s perfectly ordered, neat living room. The teapot on the coffee table was still belching out rudely and the clock on the mantle had been turned to a bright yellow canary that was still squawking the six o’clock chime.

“You, girl!” Aunt Petunia shrieked as she spotted Holly. “You put what those… those freaks did back to what they are!”

Holly raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry, Aunt Petunia, I can’t. Not allowed to do magic until I’m seventeen, aren’t I?”

The teapot gurgled something obscene, and Uncle Vernon’s beady eyes bulged angrily. Dudley stared up at Holly, who shrugged and started to turn.

“I’d suggest you started packing. I can’t imagine the Order would wait much time for you to finish packing up the china when they arrive tomorrow morning.”

“You—!”

Holly didn’t find out what Aunt Petunia was going to screech after her though because Uncle Vernon had charged up the stairs and grabbed Holly by the shoulders, whipping her back against the stair bannisters.

“This is your fault, girl!” Uncle Vernon shouted, his face an unnatural shade of puce as his huge, fat, pink hands shook Holly as if she were a rag doll. Evidently, Hestia’s Silencing Spell had worn off.

“I had nothing to do with it!” Holly shouted back, struggling, her thin arms coming up to try to break through Uncle Vernon’s grip, but he had at least ten stone on her and she’d never been able to defend herself much against the abuse her uncle heaped upon her on the best of times. Half-starved as she usually was in the summers that she had to spend with the Dursleys, she wasn’t going to succeed now, even though she was no longer the abused little girl beaten black and blue whenever her accidental magic reared to defend herself from Dudley’s bullying when they’d been small children.

“NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!” Uncle Vernon bellowed. “IT’S YOUR LOT THAT’S DOING THIS TO US! THIS MUST BE A PLOT! A PLOT FOR YOU TO GET US OUT OF THE HOUSE SO YOU CAN TAKE OVER IT FOR YOUR FREAKS!”

“What the hell are you talking about? Why would I even want your stupid house?” Holly cried. 

“I DON’T KNOW BUT YOU MUST BE PLANNING SOMETHING WITH THESE FREAKS!”

“Vernon,” Aunt Petunia said, her voice tremulous as Uncle Vernon shook Holly until her teeth rattled. “Maybe that… that witch—“

“THAT FREAK MUST BE IN CAHOOTS WITH THIS ONE!”

A massive hand reared back and struck Holly’s cheek, the slap heavy and resounding and filled with such forceful malice, it sent Holly’s head rebounding back. She hadn’t been expecting the hit. Uncle Vernon hadn’t really hit her since that letter Dumbledore had sent to Aunt Petunia back when Holly had been thirteen. Pain blossomed across her face where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek with the force of the hit.

The iron tang of blood bloomed on her tongue, and Holly grimaced, as blow after blow started raining down on her, and she could only ineffectually protect her face with her hands. It figured, Voldemort probably didn’t even need to try to get around the blood protection to get to Holly to kill her; Uncle Vernon was already doing a bang-up job of getting that done.

“Dad!” Dudley was yelling. “Dad, stop! You’re going to—“

“I’LL SHOW THESE FREAKS THEY CAN’T BE ORDERING US AROUND!”

“Vernon—!” Aunt Petunia started to cry out but Uncle Vernon wasn’t listening, and Holly was too out of it trying to ward of the blows that she didn’t realize it had stopped and Uncle Vernon had picked her up instead and started to drag her down the stairs by the low ponytail at her nape.

“There’ll be no more talk of these freaks taking my family out of my home,” Uncle Vernon fumed as he dragged Holly down through the living room, through the hall. He threw the front door open, his hold over Holly absolute and unyielding.

“Dad, stop!” Dudley cried, grabbing him by the arm as Holly tried to twist her way out of his grasp, kicking and screaming. They were making a right ruckus, but Holly was oblivious to the way the neighbors’ porch lights came on, and old Mr and Mrs Buckle two doors down had emerged to their front step to watch the family drama unfolding in the Dursleys’ manicured front yard, or how the frilly curtains to Mrs Gainsley’s living room window fluttered as she watched unabashedly as Vernon Dursley dragged his niece through the yard, Dudley shouting after him, and Petunia running out with wide, teary eyes.

Holly only had a moment of horrified realization that Uncle Vernon was taking her out of the bounds of the Dursley house before the popping sounds of Apparition filled the air, and the sight of black-robed figures in silver masks filled her blood with ice and she renewed her struggles.

“Uncle Vernon, no! Please! They’re here! They’re here to kill us all!”

Uncle Vernon wasn’t listening as he hurled her away from him, making Holly stumble backward, onto her arse on the pavement, right at the foot of a greasy-haired masked Death Eater who could only be Snape.

“Ah, it seems our job’s made simple for us all,” said one of the robed figures, and Holly instantly recognized Lucius Malfoy’s posh voice as he drew his wand out. “Gibbon, the Anti-Apparition wards. Rabastan, kill the muggles. Bellatrix—“

“You don’t give orders here, Malfoy,” Bellatrix drawled as she bent to grab Holly by the neck of her t-shirt. “What do we have here? Seems ickle Potter’s having a bit of family trouble.”

“Holly!” Aunt Petunia screeched, running out of the house to grab Dudley, who was wide-eyed and pale at the sight of the gathered Death Eaters.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Uncle Vernon growled as more Death Eaters Apparated onto the street, their wands brandished towards Holly as she struggled against Bellatrix and managed to kick her hard enough in the stomach for her to let her go.

“Aunt Petunia, take Dudley into the house!” she shouted as she scrambled away from Bellatrix and Snape. “The Order—“

“Will not be coming, Ms Potter,” Snape finished silkily for her.

“Fuck you!” she seethed, thrashing desperately to get away. Her wand... she had her wand in her pocket...

“You will cease your struggling, Potter and come with us without any trouble and we will not kill your muggle family,” Snape told her.

Uncle Vernon glowered at the gathered intruders on their street. “There’ll be no killing in front of my house—!”

“ _Avada Kedavra_ ,” Snape said, almost lazily, and the flash of green light streaked from his wand and hit Uncle Vernon straight on the chest. He dropped to the grass, his massive body trampling Aunt Petunia’s neat row of rose bushes that were only just starting to bloom.

“Vernon!” Aunt Petunia screamed.

“Mum, no!” Dudley yelled and tried pull his mother back into the house, but Aunt Petunia would not leave the yard.

One of the Death Eaters hurled a Reductor Curse towards them, but the wards, which held still for as long as Holly was underage, held, the curse dissolving into a flash and shiver of white light just as Aunt Petunia ran up to the pavement.

“No! Get back into the house!” Holly cried, hurling herself bodily to Aunt Petunia just as another flash of green streaked through the night air where Aunt Petunia had been standing. They huddled together on the ground, next to Uncle Vernon’s inanimate body as ten or so Death Eaters converged in front of them, their wands trained and ready to kill.

Aunt Petunia’s hands were like talons as they dug around Holly’s arms as she shielded her with her body. “P-Please—! Don’t hurt her!”

“Ah, what’s this?” Bellatrix laughed madly. “A Muggle begging for the life of a witch? Unhand her, you useless creature. Or perhaps—“ she cut herself off and pointed her wand straight at Aunt Petunia’s face. “ _Crucio!”_

Holly had seen wizards subjected to the Cruciatus Curse. She’d seen Voldemort subject his Death Eaters to it when he first regained his body in that graveyard in Little Hangleton. She’d seen the way that spider that the fake Moody had used to demonstrate the curse writhe in unimaginable pain. She’d even tried casting it before when her rage at Bellatrix Lestrange had nearly overwhelmed her in the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, when Bellatrix had killed her godfather.

She had never seen it administered on someone she knew, someone who held her now in her arms. Aunt Petunia gurgled and whimpered as the torture curse rippled and curdled unimaginable pain under her skin, making her writhe against Holly, her face twisting, her watery blue eyes going glassy and dark as she moaned in excruciating agony.

“Stop it!” Holly cried, holding her aunt close. “Stop it, please!”

Bellatrix cackled and merely twisted her wand as if the motion would intensify the hatred that fueled her curse and make the pain even more intense, unimaginable.

“Quit playing with food, Bellatrix,” Fenrir Greyback sneered and even above Aunt Petunia’s pitiful cries, Holly could her the undercurrent of menace in his gravely voice.

“Wouldn’t you like to eat the muggle filth, Greyback,” Bellatrix laughed as she cut the curse and Aunt Petunia’s body slumped against Holly’s, limp and sweat-damp, her eyes rolling back.

“Kill the muggle, Bella, and we should be getting back,” Lucius Malfoy said. “The Aurors—“

“Pah, Aurors,” Bellatrix scoffed.

Aunt Petunia gasped her pain out against Holly’s clammy neck even as she turned, her head lolling, to glare hatefully at Bellatrix. “You will not take her. My sister—“

“—is long dead, little muggle,” said Bellatrix. “As will you if you do not give us Potter.”

Holly’s heart constricted for the space of half a heartbeat. Aunt Petunia did not want her. She’d gotten Uncle Vernon killed. She’d brought the war to their doorstep. She’d—

“Over my dead body, you stupid witch!” Aunt Petunia gasped, her arms convulsively twitching around Holly’s shoulders, her nails digging into her skin. “You’ve killed my sister, my husband… I—I won’t let you kill my niece too!”

Bellatrix laughed loudly, a loud maniacal cackle that seemed to fill Holly’s world with fire and brimstone. “On your head be it. _Avada Kedavra!_ ”

“No!” Holly cried as she struggled around Aunt Petunia, the two of them tangled on the pavement, as the spell streaked unerring and true, and she closed her eyes as her world exploded in a flash of green, her magic, rippling and raw and sparking with the smell of ozone that accompanied the Killing Curse, erupted out of her skin, filling her senses with bright white light, writhing and crawling from under her skin until it exploded out of her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her very pores, a kaleidoscope of all colors and none.

Distantly, she thought she heard the anti-Apparition wards fall and the pops of Apparation resound, but the sound of her magic pouring forth drowned everything out in a resounding sonic boom that washed her world silver and then grey, and then finally, black.

And then, nothing.

* * *

“Mum! Mum, come quick!”

Holly moaned as the childish voice echoed loudly in her ears. Her body hurt all over, like she’d been run over by the Hogwarts Express and then back. She opened her eyes and everything was blurry and hazy, like her head was stuffed with cotton and she groaned as she tried to push herself up into a sitting position only to realize that she could feel nothing, like she was floating on air, except she couldn’t be because she could also feel hard packed ground on her back and the rasp of dry leaves rustling in the hot summer air against her arms.

“Lily!” another shrill childish voice cried in an admonishing tone. “Don’t touch her! She could be hurt!”

Holly groaned some more and reached up, pushing her glasses up, which were askew awkwardly on her nose and rubbed the cobwebs in her eyes. Her head hurt like a mother and it felt like all her limbs were utterly leaden, but finally, her vision settled and she righted her glasses and stared—into a pair of wide, bright green eyes.

“Hi!”

The little girl attached to the bright eyes was impossibly freckled, with a small button nose that was just slightly upturned, bow lips that curved into a wide smile, and a shock of dark red hair trapped in a messy ponytail. A slim headband with a blue fabric flower that looked just this side of bedraggled pulled her bangs from her face as she grinned impishly at Holly.

“I’m Lily, and this is my sister, Petunia,” said the little girl. “What’s your name, and is that your mum?”

Holly’s eyes widened as she stared for a long moment. Lily… and Petunia… She followed where the little girl was pointing and there, lying on the yellowing grass was Aunt Petunia, her blond hair tangled and messy over her face as she lay in heap on the ground. Holly scrambled up to her feet, only now realizing that the impossibly loose jeans she’d been wearing, a hand-me-down from Dudley, which was ridiculous since Dudley was about the size of a small whale and a boy besides, but Aunt Petunia had hardly cared because she wasn’t going to spend any money getting clothes for Holly, was even looser, even bigger than she remembered. She was swimming in the massive t-shirt and the jeans were at least a foot too long. Even the trainers on her feet felt like they were the shoes of a giant when she'd been certain before the previous term ended that her toes were going to shrivel up and die from how tight they were becoming.

Fuck, what in the world was going on?

Pushing the thought aside, she heaved her body towards where Aunt Petunia lay, crouching over her and feeling for the pulse in her neck. There was nothing. Aunt Petunia’s skin was already going cold, her long face lax, but the flesh under the skin was hard, like her body was already going into rigor mortis.

Holly sat back on her haunches and blinked back tears. Aunt Petunia hadn’t loved her all her life, but where it counted… where it counted, she’d protected Holly with her life. And now she was dead.

“Is she—is she dead?” one of the girls asked, her voice tremulous as the two of them timidly approached Holly, who up to that moment, had been somewhat managing the well of grief in her chest fairly admirably, was now suddenly unable to bite back her tears as they pricked through her eyelids and ran unchecked down pale, wan cheeks. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“Are you hurt?” the red-haired girl asked. Holly stared at her through her tears. She’d said her name was Lily, and the other taller blond girl beside her, Petunia, but… it couldn’t be… could it?

“I—I’m not—“ she stopped when she heard her own voice. She sounded just as tiny, just as shrill, just as childish as the two girls, and she looked down at her hands. She didn’t have very big hands, but she liked to think that as she grew into adulthood, her hands had grown with her. What she held in front of her though were tiny little child hands, just this side of chubby.

Fuck. Fuck, this couldn’t be _happening_ …

“Lily, Petunia, what are you two girls up to now?”

Holly looked up. A worn-looking woman with reddish brown hair and wearing the dark green scrubs of what she was certain was a nurse, emerged from a cluster of dead-looking trees.

“Oh my!” the woman cried as she saw Holly, dirt-streaked and pale, and Aunt Petunia, dead and unmoving, on the ground. “Mike! Michael, come quickly, someone’s hurt!”

* * *

It was perhaps two hours later that Holly found herself sitting in a hard plastic chair in a cramped police precinct. Holly had never been to a police station in her life, but she sat there now, her eyes empty of tears, her mind numb, as a tall policeman in blue uniform turned away from the red-haired woman who’d found her with the two girls. The woman had introduced herself as Flora Evans and had immediately gone towards Aunt Petunia’s body, checked and ascertained that she was, in fact, dead, before grabbing the three girls and ushering them away from the body, while her husband, Michael Evans, a thin man with a long, bony face and blond hair that was greying at the temples, went to try to find a telephone to call the police.

It had taken an over hour for the local police to arrive and cordon off the area. Mrs Evans had held on to her two girls, relinquishing her hold over Holly when another policeman came to get her name.

“Holly,” she whispered, her tears drying on her pale, bruised cheeks where Uncle Vernon had hit her repeatedly. “Holly Potter.”

Now, she sat in the precinct and stared at the messy desk of the police officer who had taken her and the Evanses to the precinct. There was a small calendar at the corner of the desk that told Holly the date was July 30, 1971. She shuddered. It was the summer before her mother, Lily Evans, would go to Hogwarts. She didn’t know entirely what had happened, but it seemed she’d been propelled into the past completely.

The same policeman had just finished interviewing Mrs Evans over what she had seen, before he turned to regard Holly. The man was thin and grey, like Mr Evans, with broad features and a sun-weathered face, but the smile on his face was kind as he looked at Holly. The worn name plate affixed to the left breast of his uniform identified him as Officer Grant.

“I’m very sorry, Holly,” he said quietly. “Your mum didn’t make it. She was dead when Mrs Evans found her. Can you tell me what happened? How the two of you came to be in the forest?”

Holly stared, unseeing, at the tiny hands on her lap. She didn’t know what to tell the officer because she didn’t quite understand what had happened to her either. One minute, there’d been Death Eaters in front of the Dursley house on Privet Drive, and then the next, Bellatrix Lestrange had killed Aunt Petunia and then that flash of unexplainable magic… Had that been her? Had she caused this… this strange jump backwards in time? And had she caused herself to regress back into her eleven year old body?

“I don’t remember, sir,” she said quietly. Her voice was ragged from crying and she felt utterly wrung out. “My—she’s not my mum. She’s my aunt.”

Officer Grant gave her a kind smile before he looked askance at his partner and shook his head. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you that your aunt didn’t make it, Holly. Now, you’ve got all these bruises on your face. Can you tell me what happened?”

In her mind’s eye, she saw flashes of the apoplectic rage that had overtaken Uncle Vernon over the news that the Dursleys would have to leave Privet Drive in order to be protected from any backlash from Voldemort and his Death Eaters. She saw fists raining down on her, and shuddered. Uncle Vernon hadn’t been the nicest person, but he’d never actually hit Holly quite the way he’d slapped her down and dragged her out of the house to throw her out before.

She shook her head. She’d just look crazy if she told the policeman that her uncle, who was nowhere to be found, probably not even a full grown adult at this time, had beaten her up right before some crazy robed and masked figure wielding a magic stick had killed him using magic. “I don’t remember.”

Officer Grant smiled sadly and shook his head. “Never you mind, lass. We’ll try to find your family then so someone can pick you up before sundown.”

Holly fidgeted as she stared at where Mr and Mrs Evans and their two children were still talking to the other police officer. “I don’t have any other family, sir. My Aunt was the one who raised me.”

The policeman clucked and gave her that “you poor little thing” sort of face that people always gave Holly whenever they found out that she was an orphan. “Well, that makes things a mite bit complicated then. There isn’t an orphanage in a hundred miles, not until you get to Nottingham at least.”

Holly stared at the policeman for a moment as he turned away to confer with his partner. It didn’t really matter that there was no one to get her. She knew she looked eleven physically, but her mind was that of a seventeen year old. She had her wand in the pocket of the massive hand-me-down trousers she wore, and she knew how to Apparate. She could just… do what she’d done back when she’d run away from home when she was thirteen—or, well thirteen in her timeline since she was apparently eleven again now—and Apparate or take the Knight Bus to Diagon Alley, where she could stay at the Leaky Cauldron.

Something drew her attention though, and she looked up and found herself staring at little Lily Evans. Her mother, at eleven, was even tinier than her. She wore a blue floral frock that looked like it had seen better days, but it appeared meticulously clean. Her skin was fair, though dotted with freckles, and she had a healthy flush to her cheeks, brought on by the summer sun. Although she didn’t appear affluent, there was no mistaking that this little girl belonged to a loving family and Holly suddenly felt a lump in her throat as she realized there was no way she would belong with the family that Lily Evans had now, not with her sitting here alone in a police precinct, and she didn’t know whether she had it within her to approach this child version of her mum, not when they were worlds apart in life experiences.

Lily, apparently, had no such reservations as she broke away from the hold her mother had on her and scampered towards Holly.

“I saw you earlier,” Lily said, her voice hushed. “You were doing magic before you woke up.”

Holly blinked.

“You were floating, just a couple feet above the ground,” Lily said matter-of-factly. “And you have a wand in your pocket. I don’t have one yet, but Mum says I’m going to have to go to that magic place in London to get one in preparation for school.”

Holly’s eyes widened as she instinctively stuck her hand in the pocket of her jeans to feel for her wand. It was there, the holly wood warm and comforting to her touch.

“I’m going to ask Mum if you can come home with us,” Lily told her. And with that, she hurried back to her mother’s side, tugging insistently at Mrs Evans’ scrubs and then whispering furiously into her ear. Mrs Evans nodded at whatever it was Lily said, before she glanced back, that pitying look in the green eyes that Lily inherited from her, the same probably that Holly herself inherited, and said a quiet word to Mr Evans, before she marched up to the two policemen.

“Officer Grant? I understand this little girl doesn’t have any family and it would take time for you to arrange for her to be taken to the orphanages in Nottingham. My husband and I wouldn’t mind taking her home with us in the meantime. It’s getting dark and young children shouldn’t have to be left here in the precinct without a chaperone.”

The two policemen looked for a moment to be utterly stumped before Officer Grant gave a rueful smile and scratched the back of his head sheepishly. Evidently, that hadn’t been what he and his partner were conferring about; they hadn’t even thought of what to do with Holly the entire time they’d been discussing her appearance.

“You’ve a heart of gold, Mrs Evans,” the policeman said with a wide smile as he pulled up some form from the mess of papers on his desk and started writing up a release of custody to the Evanses. “Now, Holly, Mr and Mrs Evans here have very kindly agreed to take you in for the evening, while we try to sort out what happened with your aunt. Officer Collins and I will release you to Mrs Evans until we’ve sorted out what we can do for you, but in the meantime, we’d like for you to go with Mrs Evans here and be a good girl, all right?”

Holly stared incredulously at the policeman, boggled for a moment as to why an adult man was speaking to her as if she were a dunce before she remembered that to them, she looked eleven. She may as well have been a dunce, at least where a home situation was concerned for the moment, and she nodded, a touch warily, as Mr and Mrs Evans signed the forms.

Mrs Evans smiled, rather sweetly, at Holly as she bent down a little and offered her hand. “Come on, I think you’ve had enough of a terrible day today and deserve a bit of dinner, don’t you think, girls?”

Lily Evans beamed at her mother before she turned to Holly, grabbing the hand that wasn’t in Mrs Evans’ grasp. Even Petunia smiled a little uncertainly as the five of them walked out the precinct.

Holly couldn’t believe this was her life and she stared back at the squat little building of the police precinct all the way until they reached the bus stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I am again with experimental fic, this time with fem!Harry, unexplained, spontaneous time travel (that's my thing, ok! Don't @ me) and all the usual unedited, un-beta'd (unusually un-referenced) terribleness that comes from fic I write.


	2. The Evans Home

The Evanses lived in a cramped three-story row house, smack in the middle of the working class town of Cokeworth, right at the mouth of a rundown street called Spinner’s End. There were rows upon rows of sorry-looking brick townhomes that looked like they had seen better days, and the block that the Evanses walked up to was no different: the bricks were bleached in places from long exposure to the sun and browned in others from the grimy air, the eaves were old and heaving, the paint brittle and a little sun-bleached and starting to warp in corners. But the tiny patch of greenery on the front yard was meticulously kept, the small row of yellow daffodils in a flower box hanging just beneath the front hall window was blooming merrily, and the yard was neatly swept of leaves and litter, which was more than could be said of the homes on the blocks further down the street.

Holly stared up at the home where her mother had grown up. She’d never been to Cokeworth except in passing, that time when Uncle Vernon had driven them through the rundown little town when they’d attempted to outrun Holly’s Hogwarts letters. She hadn’t even known her mother was from Cokeworth, and had no idea what to expect. She definitely hadn’t expected to see that the Evanses lived in such a sordid little town, somehow the image just wouldn’t fit with what she knew of Aunt Petunia, who’d been obsessed with living an upscale, perfectly ordinary middle class life.

“Come on,” Lily said excitedly. “You can share with me in my room!”

“Will not!” Petunia cried as the two girls raced each other up to the front door that Mr Evans quickly unlocked. “I’m the one who’s got the bigger bed, so Holly can kip with me!”

“Mum—!” Lily cried, a definite note of whining in her voice that had Holly smiling furtively as she remembered how different it had been between her and Dudley. They’d loathed each other with a passion that was definitely encouraged on Dudley’s part by his parents. Lily and Petunia seemed nothing of the sort.

“Well, maybe all three of you can kip in one room,” Mrs Evans said placatingly as she ushered the three of them into the house. “Lord only knows, at least that means one less room to clean in the morning.”

“Tuney will clean up,” Lily volunteered her sister and Petunia sniffed but said nothing as the three of them entered the house.

The front door opened in a small hall next to a cramped staircase that Holly surmised must lead to the bedrooms in the second floor. There was a small table with a dinky, chipped little porcelain bowl where Mr Evans dropped the house keys before he led the little family into the living room. The living room was a small albeit comfortable affair: a large, ancient-looking but squashy leather couch tucked against the wall, two mismatched chintz armchairs that looked the absolute picture of kitsch to Holly, a low table in the middle, with what looked like a stack of school books that belonged to Petunia, as Lily wouldn’t have gotten her school supplies for Hogwarts yet. The chairs were arranged in front of a small iron-grated fireplace tucked under a wooden mantle, the polish old and patina’d to a homey warm brown. On it arranged rather neatly in kitschy looking picture frames were photographs of the little family.

“Over here, dear,” Mrs Evans said as she led Holly to take a seat on the couch. Lily clambered up beside her, smiling widely. “Tuney dear, why don’t you get something for Holly to change into? Look at the clothes she’s wearing, they scarcely fit her, the poor dear.”

Mr Evans smiled fondly at his wife as he headed through a doorway that Holly surmised must lead to the kitchen. “I’ll go and make tea.”

Mrs Evans made Holly change into a borrowed frock from Petunia, the hem, since Petunia was tall for a thirteen-year-old, of which were just this side of too long, but fitted her rather nicely compared to Dudley’s oversized, cast-off clothing, before Mr Evans served tea and biscuits in mismatched plates and mugs and teacups in the living room. Lily and Petunia sat beside Holly, Lily fidgeting and restless, Petunia, supremely controlled and prim as she delicately handled her teacup.

“Now, Lily tells me that she saw you doing magic when they found you. Is this true?”

Holly nodded, though she said nothing more as she reached and grabbed a mug of tea for herself so she had something to do with her hands. As much as she was excited to get to know the Evanses, she didn’t know what she could possibly tell them. Lily, her mother, was eleven, for crying out loud, and she’d just seen the adult version of Petunia die before her very eyes, from the Killing Curse. She didn’t know Mr and Mrs Evans, and although she wanted so very badly to get to know them, Holly knew deep down that they weren’t hers to get to know.

“She has a wand, mum!” Lily said around a mouthful of biscuits.

Petunia made a face at her. “Finish what’s in your mouth before you talk, Lily, that’s just gross!”

“That’s wonderful to hear, dear,” Mrs Evans said. “Does this mean you were going to Hogwarts too?”

Holly pulled out her wand from the pocket of the borrowed frock, wondering for a moment how Lily could have spotted it when it had been jammed into Holly’s jean pocket earlier, and stared down at it. That was the question, wasn’t it? She remembered something Hagrid had said before about her admittance to Hogwarts, but since it was 1971, a full nine years before Holly Potter was supposed to have been born, did that mean that she wouldn’t be entered into the Book of Admittance, and therefore not enrolled into Hogwarts?

“Er, actually, I haven’t gotten a letter yet,” she hedged. “I know we get our Hogwarts letter when we turn eleven, and I’m not er, turning eleven until tomorrow.”

“Oh, it’s your birthday?” Lily exclaimed, spraying bits of biscuit all over her dress and she grinned sheepishly at her parents’ chastising glares. “Oops, sorry!”

Mr Evans smiled. “Well, I would say a very happy birthday to you, Holly, but it’s terrible that you had to lose your aunt right the day before. Were the two of you out to get presents when we found you? Although I can’t imagine why you would be walking through the forest, but I suppose people like to cut through the woods enough to get to town.” He turned to his daughters with a stern eye. “That’s what the two of you were planning, weren’t you?”

Petunia sniffed and sipped neatly at her tea. “Of course not, Dad. Lily thought she saw a cluster of butterflies and wanted to follow them.”

“They were pretty!” Lily said, a bit defensively. “One of them was this big red and gold one and it landed on Holly’s head and that’s how I found her. I think the butterflies were magic! Maybe they appeared and led me to you, Holly!”

“Well,” said Mrs Evans with a fond, but rather exasperated look at her daughters, “I’m sure Holly is very tired from all of this excitement. Why don’t you two girls go and setup your beds in Tuney’s room? Your dad and I would like to talk to Holly for a bit, to see how we can help her.”

Petunia nodded and set down her tea and scampered off. Lily rushed to do the same before she had a sudden thought, and she grabbed Holly’s wrist as she stared at her parents.

“Mum, Dad, I heard what the policemen said earlier, that Holly would have to go to an orphanage because she’s got no one to take care of her, but…” She hitched her little shoulders into a shrug as she looked back at Holly, her green eyes bright and earnest. “I can’t imagine what kind of life she’d have in an orphanage. What if they don’t let her use her magic or what if they don’t let her go to Hogwarts? I—I think we should think about what we can do for her, if she can’t stay with us, permanently.”

She nodded succinctly, her thoughts aired out and she let go of Holly as she went to follow her sister, walking at a more sedate pace than the jittery energy Holly had seen earlier back when they were at the police station.

Mr and Mrs Evans exchanged a fond look, smiling after their youngest daughter.

“She’s a good girl, our Lily,” Mr Evans said, before the two of them turned as one at Holly, looking at her with such kind eyes that Holly felt a sudden lump in her throat.

“Are you… are you really going to send me away? To the orphanage?”

Mr Evans took his wife’s hand as he looked at her. He had the kindest blue eyes Holly had ever seen in her life. “We wouldn’t do that to you. Flora and I have talked a bit at the precinct, and now that we’re confirmed that you’re like Lily, we thought you may be like those children Professor McGonagall had told us about when she came to see us about Lily, the ones who come from purely magical families.” He leaned forward, his blue eyes taking on that same earnest shine that Lily’s had as he regarded Holly. “We’d like to offer our home to you, until we’ve spoken to Professor McGonagall, and she’s looked into the matter of your family, coming from those purely magical ones. Would that be all right?”

Holly fidgeted, the wand in her hand warm as she regarded the two older people. They looked so kindly at her that she felt her heart expand a thousand times in her chest and briefly, she had to wonder if perhaps she had somehow died with Aunt Petunia, and maybe this was a glimpse of the afterlife, a life with the family Holly had never known.

“I—I guess that’s okay, though I don’t really come from a purely magical family, like what you’re thinking.” She wondered if the Evanses letting McGonagall know about her existence would mean that the Potters would be alerted to her presence. Would they take her? Or would the Pureblood family realize that they knew no one of her name and deny her her heritage?

“It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t find your magical family, dear,” Mrs Evans said. “There’s… something about you that—“ She cut herself off and smiled as Mr Evans’ hand on her arm patted her comfortingly. “You’ll always be welcome in our home, if we never find your family. Now, enough talk. We should look after those dreadful bruises on your face. That really should have been the first thing I’d done when we arrived.”

Later on, after the little family, along with Holly, had dinner and washed and retired for the evening, Holly followed Lily and Petunia upstairs, through the den where there was a small, black and white television with old-fashioned dials for switching the power, volume and channels, and into Petunia’s tiny, cramped bedroom, where Petunia had setup a small camp bed on the floor for Holly, and Lily had dragged the mattress of her bed in and crammed it against the door so that she could share the room with them. Petunia lent her pyjamas, and Mrs Evans gave her a clean toothbrush and towel so she could wash up.

They sat in Petunia’s bedroom, Lily lounging on the bed with Petunia as they browsed through old glossy magazines and admired glamorous-looking photographs of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway, while Holly lay in the camp bed and amused herself by watching the sisters. Petunia and Lily, as young children, weren’t very different at all, contrary to what Holly imagined. Lily had a small, pert, heart-shaped face and Petunia’s was only a little longer, her features sharper, but they both had the same earnest glimmer in their eyes, and the same mouth that was quick to smile. Holly wouldn’t have imagined that Aunt Petunia could be this bright, fresh-faced little girl, who was a little too formal, but mostly just wanted a bit of attention from friends and parents alike. She tended to be more quiet where Lily was a little more boisterous, but the sisters shared a similar mild temperament, and it seemed, very similar interests as well. When Petunia started to coo over a glossy shot of Cary Grant and Lily’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she teased her sister about meeting her own Cary Grant now that Petunia was in secondary school.

“Holly,” Petunia said, looking up from the magazine suddenly. “What happens if you don’t get your letter to Hogwarts?”

Lily looked at her sister and started to open her mouth to protest that _of course_ Holly would get her letter; she was magic, just like Lily, but Petunia shushed her impatiently.

“I just mean—you’re very far away from home. Didn’t you say you were from Surrey? How would the magic people find you to give you your letter if you’re not in your house in Surrey?”

Holly sat up as she gave some thought on it. Truthfully, she didn’t want to have to go through seven years of Hogwarts again. She’d already been through six, and before she’d been attacked at the Dursleys, had even intended on dropping out of her seventh year so she could go Horcrux hunting to finish out the quest that Dumbledore had left her, with her friends.

But how could she even do that now? Granted she had the mind and experience of a seventeen year old, but her body remained that of a small child of eleven, and there was no way any of the adults in the house would let her go off on her own. It wasn’t like Holly wanted to go off on her own either anyway. She knew next to nothing of 1971. She didn’t even know if Voldemort was already actively trying to incite the Purebloods into genocide at this time, or if he was still hiding out in Albania, like Dumbledore thought he had done before he returned to Britain. Holly felt woefully out of her depth with the life she’d suddenly found herself in and it made her feel utterly cold and alone so suddenly, even though both Lily and Petunia were warm presences in the cosy little room with her.

“I don’t really know,” she said at length when Petunia continued to wait for her answer. “Your mum and dad said they’ll try to help look for my magical family through Hogwarts, but I don’t even know if they’d have me. None of them know I’m even alive.”

Petunia gasped, utterly scandalized, and utterly captivated by this piece of gossip. “Really? How come? Didn’t your parents tell your relatives about you?”

Holly smiled ruefully, her eyes flicking to Lily, who looked at her quizzically, for a moment, before she turned back to staring at the unremarkable white ceiling of Petunia’s bedroom. “My parents died a long time ago, when I was very young. My aunt—she raised me with her family, but they didn’t like magic, and they kept me hidden away because they thought I was a freak.”

“That’s awful!” Lily cried. “How can they do that to you?”

Holly smiled sadly and shrugged, but didn’t look at her. She had a feeling if she looked at Lily now, she would likely start crying, and since she kept silent, there was no more conversation as to what Holly would do if she didn’t get a Hogwarts letter. She was still on the fence as to whether she even wanted to attend. Going to classes seemed like such a boring waste of her time compared to what she’d already been through, but what would she do if she didn’t? It wasn’t like she could go to normal secondary school like Petunia did.

Eventually, their eyes started to droop and Lily removed herself from Petunia’s bed and settled into her mattress by the door, bidding everyone good night before she got up to shut off the lights.

Holly lay in bed for a long moment, staring off into the darkness, and wondering what it was she was meant to do now. She felt so utterly disconnected from the reality she was facing, in a world where nothing of her experiences had even started yet, and she didn’t quite know what to do with herself.

Eventually, even her eyes started to tire and drift closed, until she felt Petunia shift a little on the bed beside her. Through the moonlight streaming into the open window, she could see Petunia’s eyes, glassy and half-lidded as she regarded Holly quite intensely.

“Holly,” she said quietly as she stared down at her from the side of her bed.

“Yeah?”

She fidgeted, something Holly hadn’t ever seen this child version of Aunt Petunia ever do, not since she’d met her. “Can I ask you something? I—I think it might be personal and you don’t have to answer, but…”

“Yeah?” she repeated, equally quiet, a little unnerved by the serious expression on this Petunia’s young face.

“Was it your family that did that to you?”

She made an abortive gesture towards Holly’s face and Holly felt like a stone had dropped heavily in her stomach as she half sat up. On the mattress on the far side of the room next to the door, Lily snuffled in her sleep, shifting a little to get more comfortable in the balmy summer night.

“What makes you say that?”

Petunia didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Holly thought she’d fallen asleep thinking about her answer, when she shifted and brought her fist to prop her chin up so she could look at Holly more closely. She could only imagine how bad the bruises on her face must be. She’d tried not to look at herself in the bathroom mirror when she’d been brushing her teeth, but she hadn’t been able to help catching a glimpse of her face. Her left cheek was swollen where Uncle Vernon had gotten that first good slap at her, and she had a myriad other bruises on her temples and jaw and neck and shoulders where his meaty hands and fists had caught her.

“I just thought… you didn’t seem very keen when mum and dad brought up looking for your family,” Petunia whispered. “Or when the police brought it up earlier. It’s like… it’s like you don’t really want to go home.”

Holly sighed as she lowered herself to bed slowly. “I don’t know what to say about it, Petunia,” she said at length. “All I know…” She swallowed around the thickness she could suddenly feel in her throat. “All I know is that I’m not really supposed to be here. I think—I’m supposed to be dead.”

There was silence for a moment before a quiet sniffle came from the mound on the bed. Holly turned in time to see Petunia swipe a hand to her eyes.

“I hope you never find them,” Petunia said softly, looking down at her. “I hope you never find them so you can just stay here with us.”

Holly blinked and looked up at her. She’d wiped another tear that threatened to spill and the glimmer of moonlight caught her tears for a frozen moment before it was gone.

“I don’t know what it is, but Lily likes you, and I guess I like you too.” She sighed and straightened on her back, away from Holly’s line of sight. “I don’t like these strange things that Lily can do and I’ve never really…” She paused, before she continued in a quieter, more diffident tone. “I’ve never really had a friend who was magic. Besides Lily, I mean, and she has that mean boy who lives down the street. Severus. He’s so awful. Nothing like you. You’re a nice person.”

Holly blinked, feeling blindsided. “You don’t think I’m not normal? Like… you don’t think I’m a freak because I can do magic?”

“Of course not,” Petunia said. “If I thought you were a freak, then I’d have to think that Lily is a freak too, and she’s my little sister. She’s a little annoying, but she’s a good girl.”

“Yeah,” said Holly quietly. “I think so too.”

Petunia hummed and turned so she was facing the wall and not the edge of her bed where Holly could see her. Holly listened to the sounds of the night in middle of nowhere Cokeworth. It was nothing like Surrey here. Surrey was the vast expanse of middle class suburbia. The summer nights were quiet and punctuated only with the soft buzz of electricity from the modern homes that sprawled across the wide city expanse. Cokeworth, being a factory town had the constant hum of the mill that was the primary source of livelihood for many of the residents of the town. And then beyond that, she could hear the constant yowling of street cats, the bark and howl of stray dogs as they slinked out of whatever dumpster they hid in away from the humans that dotted the streets during the day time to scavenge in the rubbish heaps at night. It was old and decrepit and messy, but this was the place where Holly’s mother lived out her childhood, and Holly couldn’t help but fall a little bit in love with it.

“Petunia?” she said softly, wondering if the other girl had fallen asleep.

“Hmm?”

Holly settled back in the lumpy little pillow Petunia had lent her for her camp bed and closed her eyes. “It wasn’t her that hit me. My aunt. It wasn’t her. She tried to protect me.”

“I’m sorry she died,” Petunia said, though she didn’t turn to look back at Holly again.

Holly shut her eyes against the threatening onslaught of tears as she recalled the way Aunt Petunia had moaned and grimaced and writhed under Bellatrix’s Cruciatus Curse. She hadn’t been very kind to Holly all her life, but she’d tried to protect her in the end. And she had to pay for it with her life. Maybe that was all that mattered.

“Yeah, me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try for a more regular update cycle for this fic since I'm about 7 chapters ahead of what I'm posting, say Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I don't burn myself out like the crazy person that I am. I'm also striving for a 3500-5000 word chapter cadence, since I sent my some of my more recent fics to a friend and they told me they get cross-eyed with how long some of my chapters were. I'm not doing a _Gods and Men_ update cycle again. My sanity could barely handle all the twists I kept writing and posting everyday lol
> 
> In the meantime, tell me what you think of introspective!Petunia and whether you think I'm striking enough of a balance keeping Holly (Harry) in character with the expected differences if Harry were a girl growing up in the 90s.


	3. Spinner's End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, you know what, screw this posting schedule thing. I can't wait to share the story I've written, and I'm so far ahead with where I'm writing and just want to scream about things that're already happening so far into the fic that I can't seem to keep myself from posting.
> 
> Have another chapter, and don't @ me about Snape. I don't like him, and I put it in the tags.

The next morning was Holly’s seventeenth birthday, though she had to pretend it was her eleventh, when Lily woke her up with an exuberant greeting and a hug once Holly was fully awake, and even Petunia smiled rather pleasantly as they both greeted her a happy birthday, before she started setting about to fix her room and make her bed. Holly stopped her, grinning as she realized because she wasn’t supposed to exist in this timeline, there was no way the Ministry would be able to track her wand and anyway, she was of age now, sort of. The underage tracker on her wand would have dissipated.

And so, with this in mind, she uttered a quick cleaning spell that instantly made Petunia’s bed, rolled up the camp bed Holly had been using and shoved it under Petunia’s bed, and folded the sheets on Lily’s mattress. Lily stared at her with shining eyes, clapping at the small display of magic as Holly then levitated her mattress and magicked it back into her bedroom. Petunia looked approvingly at the neat tuck of her coverlet into the space between the bedframe and the mattress.

“That’s amazing! How do you know all of this if you haven’t been to Hogwarts yet?” Lily asked as the three of them took turns to use the bathroom sink to rinse out their mouths and then each changed into day clothes, with Holly once again having to borrow clothes from Petunia, this time a dowdy looking skirt that reached up to the middle of her shins, and a high collared shirt. It seemed Petunia’s wardrobe had a dearth of jeans and any sort of trousers or comfortable clothes that Holly preferred to wear.

“Er, well, I learned a lot from my friends,” she hedged. “Cleaning up spells aren’t really the sort of things you learn in Hogwarts, I don’t think. I learned this one from one of my friends’ mum. She has a lot of kids and has to constantly clean up after them.”

“Well,” Petunia said as she led the three of them down to the kitchen for breakfast. “I think that’s a pretty good use of magic. You should teach it to Lily, so she’d learn how to clean up her room properly.”

“Hey, I clean up my room fine!” Lily protested as they entered the kitchen where they were promptly greeted by the smell of eggs frying in a skillet alongside the sizzle of bacon frying in its own fat. “Mum, tell Tuney I can clean up my room just fine!”

“Your coverlets are always wonky, and you never put your books away,” Petunia said matter-of-factly, “which is why I think you should learn that spell from Holly so you can straighten up your room better.”

Lily turned hopeful eyes then to Holly who grinned crookedly. “Er, I don’t think you’d be able to use magic outside of school, Lily. I know Hogwarts doesn’t allow underage students to use magic outside of the school.”

“Really? How come you get to use your wand then?”

Holly stared at her and scratched her head, a little stumped, but Petunia saved her with a rather scornful quip of “Because she’s not a student at Hogwarts yet, silly!”

Lily laughed good-naturedly even at Petunia’s somewhat mean-spirited name-calling and Holly was saved having to answer another question when Mr Evans smiled at the three of them as he folded up his newspaper.

“Good morning, girls. Holly, did you manage to sleep well last night? I hope Lily didn’t keep you up with all this excited chatter about magic.”

Holly didn’t want to say that it was Petunia who’d kept her up with her quiet, heartfelt questions about Holly’s family and her bruises, but Lily protested that they’d all gone to bed by 10pm, just like Mum instructed and Holly was saved from having to answer. Mrs Evans plated up the eggs and bacon and set a very tall pile of toast in the middle of the kitchen table, while Petunia set out the table with clean breakfast plates and silverware with handles covered in cheap green plastic.

“Well, I’m glad the three of you are getting along,” Mrs Evans said as she heaped eggs and bacon and toast on Holly’s plate, about the same large mound of food that Holly remembered Mrs Weasley giving her on all the times she’d spent the night at the Burrow with Ron and Hermione. “Holly dear, Officer Grant was along earlier to tell us that a social worker would be by later this week to help with your case. I hope you don’t mind, I’ve asked that you’ll stay here until then. I’d really rather not that you were sent off to an orphanage if you don’t have to.”

Holly looked up from where she’d proceeded to inhale the food set in front of her and blushed a little when Mr and Mrs Evans stared at her seemingly endless appetite. They’d done the same the previous night, when they’d all had dinner.

“Er,” she swallowed and made sure there was no more toast in her mouth before she answered, “yes, thank you very much, Mrs Evans. I hope I’m not imposing too much on you.”

“Of course not, dear,” Mrs Evans said and Mr Evans smiled at her in agreement. “Well, I have a shift at the hospital in an hour, but Mike will be here with you girls, and I’ll try to be back early so we can take the three of you out to help Holly celebrate her birthday.”

Holly blushed as she nearly choked on a piece of bacon and she had to wash it down with tea before she could protest. “You don’t need to do that, Mrs Evans! I’m already putting you out so much by being here.”

“Nonsense,” Mr Evans said, and he had this flat accent that made him sound both utterly rustic and endearing at the same time. “Of course we should do that. You’re our family while you’re staying with us, Holly.”

Holly wanted to blame that piece of bacon she’d choked on for the prickle of tears in her eyes as Mr and Mrs Evans gave her the kindest looks that they probably would never understand, but Holly knew had much to do with the fact that she _was_ in fact their family, only they’d never met her in her timeline. She didn’t want to tell anyone that things like time travel could exist because of magic, especially since they were all so very clueless as to how magic worked, even Lily. They would think she was crazy or making things up just so she could insinuate herself in their little family.

“Mum,” Lily said at length when she was done scarfing down her own breakfast, “Holly said she doesn’t know if she’ll get her Hogwarts letter, but she should today, right, since she turned eleven? Do you think we could ring Professor McGonagall and ask her?”

Holly tried not to laugh at the idea that Professor McGonagall would have a telephone in her office in Hogwarts. As far as she knew, telephones wouldn’t work in a place so inherently filled with magic, but she didn’t want to tell them that, lest they wonder how she knew if she was supposed to have never been to the legendary school either.

“I don’t think Professor McGonagall left a calling card, dear,” Mrs Evans said, and she said it with such a straight face that Holly nearly did manage to lose control of her laughter. As it were, she snorted into her tea to hide the smile that threatened to overcome her face. “But maybe your dad can write to her? She did leave that owl out in the backyard in case we needed to get in touch with her, did she not?”

Mr Evans craned his neck to look through the kitchen window out into the small neat backyard of the Evans home and Holly followed his line of sight. Sure enough, there was a small brown barn owl sitting quietly on the low wooden fence that separated the property from the townhouse right next door.

“She did. Come to think of it, we should probably write her about going to that place in London as well, the one where we’re supposed to buy all of Lily’s magic supplies. I think we should make a trip of it today, if you can manage to get out of your shift early.”

Mrs Evans was nodding as she started to gather the dishes and Holly immediately stood up to help her before she remembered that she was a witch and used her wand to stack the dishes together and levitate them to the sink.

“My, but you are rather skilled at that for someone who hasn’t gone to Hogwarts,” Mrs Evans said admiringly.

“Holly helped make my bed today using the same magic,” Petunia said, her eyes shining.

“And move my mattress back in my room!” Lily piped up, not to be outdone in the stories admiring how magic made things easy for everyone.

Holly had to blush and put away her wand. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself and she realized all this use of magic was just making it obvious to the Evanses that she was not a novice like Lily at all, and if she wanted to appear normal next to them, then she needed to reign in showing off what she could do with her wand.

“Well,” said Mrs Evans once Petunia started to see to doing the dishes, and she’d packed up her purse. She was already in a fresh, if slightly worn, set of her green scrubs. “I’ve called in that I’m only taking the half shift. I should be back after lunch and then we can make a day of it at that magic street if Professor McGonagall can make it here.”

“Oh,” Holly said and realized here was probably the right time to be able to say that she knew more about magic than the average first year, as opposed to all the showing off of wandwork with stupid levitation spells. “You don’t have to ask her over. I know how to get there. I can show you how. I think… I think I need to go to Gringotts anyway. My, er, family has a vault and I need to draw some money so I can pay for everything that you’ve had to spend on me here.”

“You don’t need to do that, dear,” Mrs Evans said as she kissed her daughters and husband goodbye. “We opened our home to you; you shouldn’t have to pay for our hospitality.”

“But—“

“But nothing,” said Mr Evans as he reached over and ruffled her messy black bangs until it seemed to stick out in every direction. “Don’t worry, Holly. Our home may not be much, but we’re more than happy to help you out until your situation has been sorted out by the local authorities.”

Mrs Evans eventually left for work and Mr Evans shooed the three girls out of the kitchen so he could pen his note to Professor McGonagall about Holly and about Lily’s school shopping. The three of them moved out into the living room where Lily picked up her shoes and started to put it on.

“Holly, I’m going to go over down the street to meet my friend, Sev. Want to come?”

Holly’s eyes widened as she realized that the Sev this little girl version of her mother was talking about was Severus Snape, Death Eater and the man who’d murdered both Dumbledore and Uncle Vernon, and she paled as she thought of how she was going to react if she ever had to meet with this child version of Snape. If memory served from what she’d seen in Snape’s Pensieve, Snape as a child wasn’t any less dour and unpleasant as he was in adulthood, and Holly honestly had no intention of making friends with the junior Death Eater in the making, but at the same time, she didn’t want to leave Lily alone with him, and Petunia looked like she wasn’t particularly keen to meet with Snape either, but Holly couldn’t think of a way to tell her mother that she wanted nothing to do with even a child version of her most hated teacher and the murderer of her mentor.

Petunia resolved her quandary for her. “We’ll go out to meet with your friend, Lily, but I warn you, if he’s going to be a berk to either me or Holly, we’re leaving.”

Lily frowned at that. “Severus isn’t a berk, Tuney. He just has it really terrible with his family.” She turned to Holly. “Sev’s dad isn’t a very nice man and Sev just has a really hard time about it.”

Petunia sighed as she gestured for Holly to start putting on her shoes too. “You keep telling yourself that, Lily,” she muttered, but said nothing further.

The three of them walked down the street. Holly noticed, the further they got from the junction, the more dilapidated the houses started to look. There were rubbish piles on the edge of every block by the time they’d walked down three, and there were mangy stray cats pawing through the rubbish piles looking for discarded food. The windows of some of the houses appeared boarded up, and there were even a few that appeared shattered beyond repair.

Severus Snape lived on the last block at the end of the cul de sac of Spinner’s End, next to a dingy river that smelled like industrial waste. The door to the house he lived in looked decrepit and smelled rather alarmingly of cat piss and the very faint sour traces of vomit. Petunia wrinkled her nose as she and Holly hung back while Lily climbed up the steps leading to the front door and knocked. The Snapes’ house had no yard, unlike the Evanses, and the only decoration on the paved front porch was the rickety-looking mailbox that had evidently seen better days. Holly thought she spied a couple payment due notices sticking out of the mouth of the mailbox, which lent to the idea that the box was probably overflowing and whoever Snape’s parents were, they weren’t much for checking their mail.

The door opened rather quickly and a tall, skinny greasy-haired sallow-faced boy wearing a ridiculous smock stood behind the door, his expression sour until he saw Lily’s smiling face. Then the boy smiled himself, and Holly couldn’t help thinking that a smiling Severus Snape, even one that was eleven years old, still looked creepy and odd in a manner she couldn’t quite pinpoint or explain.

“Hello Lily.” His beady black eyes darted to the two figures behind Lily and his eyes settled, rather belligerently, on Petunia. “And Petunia.”

“Hi Sev!” Lily greeted brightly. “Do you think your mum would let you come out to play with us? I want to introduce you to our new friend.”

Snape’s eyes seemed to take in Holly very slowly, raking over her up and down in a manner she didn’t think she quite appreciated, before he settled on another one of his sour expressions. “I don’t think—“

“She’s magic, like us, and she already has a wand!” Lily stage-whispered, and Snape’s eyes widened minutely before he opened the door wider.

“Would you like to come in, then? My dad is out and mum is cleaning in the kitchen.”

Holly glanced back at Petunia as she prodded her to follow Lily first. Inside Snape’s house was again nothing like the Evanses. The layout of the interior was the same: a short narrow hall that opened into a small living room and a doorway at the other end that would lead to the kitchen, but where the Evans home was warm and cosy, Snape’s house just looked tiny and cramped and decrepit. The ugliest brown couch with a massive dark stain on one of the seats dominated the living room. A comfortable looking armchair upholstered in aging corduroy was across it, facing where the fireplace should have been, except it was boarded up, and a low table with a small television set occupied the space instead. The coffee table in the middle was littered with empty bottles of what looked like a locally bottled brand of beer, and stained mugs with the dried up dregs of that morning’s coffee. The windows had heavy drapes that blocked out the sunlight, and the whole place just had this heavy air that smelled like stale beer and old sweat, as if the stench had permanently seeped into the walls of the place and could no longer be dispelled.

Holly tried not to look disgusted as she searched out a corner of the sofa that didn’t look like it was stained, and perched herself rather delicately on it, the same way Petunia had, only Petunia also very primly put her hands in her lap so she didn’t have to touch any portion of the couch with her bare skin. Lily was a bit more comfortable as she sat next to Petunia.

“Oh, Sev, I haven’t introduced you yet. This is our new friend, Holly. She’s come to stay with us for a while, because her aunt died and the police are trying to find her other relatives.”

Snape’s pale lips curled minutely in that sneering way Holly would never forget of her old Potions teacher at the mention that the muggle police was handling the investigation into the death of her aunt. “So you don’t come from a magical family, then?”

Holly blinked at the sound of disdain that she could detect in the raspy voice of this child version of her former professor. “Er, well, actually I do, I guess you could say that. Both my parents are magical, though my mum’s family is muggle. I’m Holly Potter.”

“Potter?” the voice was thin and reedy and female, and Holly’s eyes widened a little as Snape’s mother emerged from the kitchen. She was a skinny, bony-faced woman who may once have been rather comely, but was now plain and tired-looking in her middle age. She had the same black hair as Snape, though hers didn’t look half as greasy, and it was tied neatly in a ponytail at her nape, similar to Holly’s. Her dress appeared to perhaps once have been handsome, but now only looked worn and tired and dated, and her hands were covered in dishwater suds up to her elbows. When she smiled though, some of the careworn lines on her face appeared to disappear and she looked almost pleasant.

“Hello there, I’m Severus’ mother. You may call me Eileen.” Her voice was strange, reedy and thin like she was constantly tired, but with the faint traces of that posh accent that Holly remembered from Malfoy. It seemed utterly incongruous with the woman wearing the dowdy, old dress, her hands covered in sudsy dishwater.

“Hello, Mrs Snape,” Holly greeted politely, because there was no point in being rude to a woman who was being perfectly civil and polite, unlike the boorish little snot that was her son.

“I heard you mention your name, and I was wondering if you were related to… ah, what was his name? Fleamont Potter, that’s the one! He’s the potioneer who invented the Sleekeazy, and I’ll tell you, when that hair potion first hit the markets of Diagon Alley, every witch and wizard who had any galleon to spare couldn’t get enough of it. It made the hair look sleek and beautiful and shining, like young Lily’s here.”

Holly cut her eyes to look at her mother’s hair and realized with a pang of envy that Mrs Snape was probably right, Lily did have perfect looking hair, and wasn’t that such a pity when Holly inherited her dad’s messy black hair instead? She recalled Sirius telling her once that Fleamont’s invention didn’t even work on James’ hair, which was quite the joke in the family considering Fleamont’s invention was sought after far and wide by witches and wizards of all ages.

“Er, can’t say that I am, ma’am,” she said diffidently. “I’ve never met the man.”

“Oh but if you are magical, you must certainly be related to the Potters,” said Mrs Snape. “They’re a small family these days, and mostly keep to themselves after Henry’s withdrawal from the Wizengamot, back when I was still a student. But I do remember you have their look about you: black hair, that coloring, and that mouth. Definitely the nose and jaw as well, and the spectacles. Why, you look just like Fleamont Potter when I saw him when I was nine years old!”

“Really?” Lily said excitedly. “Holly, maybe this means we could find your family if dad manages to contact them through Professor McGonagall! This is so exciting! Thank you very much, Mrs Snape!”

Mrs Snape smiled distractedly at Lily as she regarded Holly a final time. “Well, I hope you do find your family, Holly, and you’ll be ever so lucky if you’re indeed related to the Potters. Why they’re practically wizard royalty, with the fortune Fleamont made from Sleekeazy!”

She smiled at the group of kids one last time and then disappeared back into the kitchen. Holly could hear her washing the dishes by hand and she had to wonder, if Mrs Snape was in fact from a wizarding family, as she guessed she must be if she’d met the Potters as a child, then why did she insist on performing her chores without magic? It wasn’t like she had any restrictions; she wasn’t underage like her son was.

“Well,” said Snape in that unctuous voice of his as he regarded Lily and completely ignored Holly and Petunia as if they weren’t even there. “What would you like to do this morning, Lily?”

“Oh, I thought we could go out to the park where no one could see us so Holly can show us some more of her magic! She’s marvelous at it, Sev, right, Tuney?”

Petunia had a strained expression on her face as she nodded and Holly was seized with the strange desire to hold her hand. She seemed to be completely ill at ease around Snape.

“Perhaps Holly Potter can show us some of the famed magicks her family is known for instead? Potioneering, like that man Mum told us about, Fleamont Potter, yes? We should know for certain then if she’d managed to inherit a bit of that creative skill that the Potters are known for.”

He sneered as he stared down at Holly, who felt utterly discomfited that even as a child, this boy who would grow up to be her Potions professor could sniff that she was just utterly terrible at the subject that he would later teach and she tried to shrink in to herself, except Petunia grabbed her hand and held her wrist firmly as she stood up, affront written all over her face.

“Well, if you and your _friend_ are going to be like that, then Holly and I are leaving, Lily,” she said with that teenage air of finality that would not be swayed. “I told you that Holly and I will stay with you only if Snape is not going to be a gross creep to us, and look at this now: we’re not even here thirty minutes and he’s already being a gross creep.”

Lily frowned at her sister. “There’s nothing gross or creepy about what Severus said, and he’s right! If Holly could make potions as well as that Fleamont Potter Mrs Snape told us about, then that would mean she _has_ to be related to the Potters, right?”

“Er, Lily, I don’t think potioneering is any sort of inherited magical trait,” Holly mumbled, and Snape smirked at her behind Lily’s back. “I’m actually rather terrible at it, though I’ve been told my mother is very good at it, but in any case, it’s definitely not a trait that’s inherited, unlike… I don’t know, being a Seer or Metamorphmagic can be.”

“You can be a Seer, like predicting the future kind of Seer?” Lily asked, utterly fascinated. “And what’s Metamorphmagic?”

“A Seer,” Snape interjected in that swotty voice that reminded Holly rather uncomfortably of Hermione whenever she went off on one of her tangents to educate her less than academic-minded friends, “is a person who has the Sight, and yes, they can make prophecies regarding the future. A Metamorphmagus is a wizard who can change their appearance at will, without the use of spells or glamours.”

“You sound like you’ve memorized an entire encyclopedia of magic facts,” Petunia observed, rather snottily.

“That’s because I _am_ , in fact, magical,” Snape sniped back. “Unlike some people here. Oh, I’m sorry, there is _only_ one person here who has no magic. What a pity, so plain, so ordinary, so… unspecial.”

Petunia stood up, her eyes glimmering with tears, and she tugged Holly’s wrist so she stumbled to her feet too. “That’s it. I’m not sitting around her to be insulted. Lily, you can go play with your creepy little friend. Holly and I are going home.”

“But Tuney—!”

Holly allowed Petunia to drag her up and out the living room because she didn’t really want to be left anywhere with Snape; she might hex him, she was still so angry over the other Snape from her timeline killing Dumbledore, even though she recognized this child was nothing like the traitorous Death Eater she remembered from her own timeline.

Before they left the Snape house entirely, she looked back at the pale boy, who was smirking rather smugly at them, likely at the fact that he’d one-upped Petunia and gotten rid of the two people he didn’t appear to be interested in playing with at all, and scowled at his smug face.

“I just wanted to let you know: you’re wrong. Magic doesn’t make you special. Muggles have something special about them too. If you can’t see that, then there’s something wrong with you.”

She inclined her head towards Lily who looked torn between running after her sister and staying with her friend, before following Petunia out the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of the conversations between the characters in this fic, especially in the early years that Holly is in this timeline, seem a bit... idk stilted to me. This is because I am a crusty old person and I haven't been around to hear children talk in quite a while. I try to write the dialogue in ways I remember conversation went with the children I've taken care of (younger siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces and the like) but most of the children I've been around were either born 30 or learned how to talk watching Gossip Girl. They're not average, which means i have no idea how normal, average children talk, and this is just me pulling everything out of my ass.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this, nonetheless, because I enjoyed writing these early chapters of Holly's summer with the Evanses.
> 
> I am also looking for a beta, mostly so I could have someone to bounce ideas with for the chapters I'm working on right now (this is CH3, I'm already at CH12). Perks: you get to read the fic ahead of everyone else??? Cons: I'm crazy and you have to put up with my crazy ideas??? Idk how betas work tbh, but I'd be grateful to have one!
> 
> Anyway, if you're interested, hit me up on [Tumblr](https://mumuinc.tumblr.com) or on Discord (username: mumuinc#7662)


	4. Insecurities

Petunia had gone past two blocks of townhouses before Holly caught up to her since she was so tall and Holly, with her short eleven-year-old legs, had to run to keep up with Petunia’s fast, sharp, angry stride. She wiped at her cheeks, streaming with tears, angrily when she realized Holly was now walking abreast and then abruptly she stopped walking and turned to Holly, who was so taken aback by the sudden movement that she had to take step back else Petunia would bowl her over.

“I hate him!” she cried, stamping her foot and angrily using the heels of her palms to push more of the tears leaking out of the corner of her eyes away. “I hate him so much! Why does he have to always make me feel so—!”

Holly, never really the most perceptive when it came to interpersonal conflict that didn’t involve herself, could at least understand this time what Petunia felt. Snape had made her feel like she was less a person than Snape and Lily were, simply by virtue of having no magic. Never mind that he was basically insinuating the same of the Evans parents; Lily was too young to probably understand what Snape was hinting at over the superiority he felt by being magical. Holly had felt the same way for a while when she’d first returned from Hogwarts in her first year, though hers had more been a knee-jerk reaction to how the Dursleys had belittled and undermined her so completely in her childhood that she didn’t feel like she had any worth at all for quite very long until she’d met people who became her real friends when she’d gone to Hogwarts.

Now she realized, Petunia must feel exactly the same way, constantly being excluded from whatever play Lily and Snape probably got up to simply because she had no magic of her own, and then having to hear all of these awful little barbs that Snape undoubtedly lobbed her way made Holly realize that this was likely what had started the friction between the Evans sisters in her own timeline. Petunia’s jealousy over Lily’s magic likely only made things worse, until there was very little love lost between the sisters and Petunia, as a bitter, jealous adult, could not even bring herself to be kind to her orphaned niece when said niece started showing signs of being magical.

“Don’t pay him any attention, Petunia,” she found herself saying, a little awkward as she tried to comfort one of her new friends as Petunia hiccoughed and blubbered a little through her tears. “He’s always been a bit of an arse and everyone hates him, so I’m not surprised he’s spouting all his bigotry even as early as now.”

“Bigotry,” Petunia sobbed a little as she covered her face with her hands. “I’ve heard that word in my civics class. Oh Holly!” she cried as she threw her arms around Holly and blubbed into her shoulder. “Why don’t I have magic? Lily is magical and so are you, and so is that creepy boy Snape, but why am I so ordinary?”

Holly wanted to fidget and wished she had Hermione’s eloquence when she spoke about how muggles needed no magic to make them special and how because they had no magic, muggles were ingenious with the ways they made their own lives happy and worthwhile and comfortable, but all she could think of was of how Dudley had made her constantly feel like a freak growing up, and somehow, it felt unspeakably sad now that she realized Dudley had made her feel the way Snape had made Petunia feel when they were children.

“I’m always just going to be plain and boring and ugly Petunia, and mum and dad don’t even pay any attention to me ever since that McGonagall lady came to tell Lily she was magical!” she wailed when Holly took too long to say anything. She pulled away from Holly after a moment, her pale, pinched face blotched red and messy with tears and snot. “You don’t think that about me, do you? You don’t think I’m plain and ugly and boring and not special?”

Holly tried to smile a little uncomfortably as she patted Petunia’s arm comfortingly. “Of course I don’t. Snape is just… just jealous that you’re neat and clean and don’t have greasy hair and…” She grasped mentally for something she could say that Petunia could relate to. “And do you think Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway needed magic to be fabulous and special on the screen? I don’t think so! They don’t have magic and yet they’re still special, and good, and worthwhile, and so are you!”

Petunia sniffled some more, hiding her face in her hands until she mastered her sobbing and her tears and then wiped her face neatly with the sleeve of her dress before she looked up. “Really? You think Faye Dunaway or… or Julie Andrews isn’t magic?”

Holly wracked her brain if there was any mention that these old 1970s stage and film actors were ever mentioned as being magical and decided she’d never heard any of them mentioned by Ron or his siblings or even by Sirius, who was about as steeped in magic as she knew a Pureblood could be since he grew up in the Black household, and besides, Holly would take Julie Andrews singing the Sound of Music over any of the awful warbling she’d heard of Celestina Warbeck on the WWN.

“Petunia, I _know_ that Julie Andrews is definitely a muggle, a person who has no magic, or she wouldn’t be famous in muggle cinema,” she said comfortingly. “And there’s nothing wrong with that! Look at her; she’s beautiful and famous and she makes great films, though I’ve really only ever seen Mary Poppins when I was eight and that was in school. But that’s not the point.”

She sighed when Petunia sniffled some more, and gingerly put her arms around the taller girl, gathering her up in that way she remembered Mrs Weasley had done for her when she’d shown up at the Burrow a few weeks after Sirius had died. “The point is she didn’t need magic to make a good and worthwhile life for herself, and that’s true for everyone, magical or muggle. Magic is just… it’s just a trait, I guess that some people are born with and some not. It isn’t in any way inherently good or bad, and it doesn’t mean any superiority of a magical person over a muggle. As long as you don’t let the fact that you don’t have it define you, I think you’ll grow up to have a good and worthwhile life too.”

“But what about being plain and ugly?” Petunia persisted. “Snape always told me I look like a cow next to Lily.” And right on cue, a big fat tear leaked out of her eye and tracked down her flushed cheek.

Holly reached up and wiped it away, feeling out of her element but nonetheless wanting to comfort. This Petunia had been a good friend in the few hours that she’d known her and she didn’t deserve to be talked down to like that.

“Well, what makes you think he doesn’t feel that about himself and is just projecting is insecurity onto you?” She took Petunia’s hands which were damp and clammy now from having wiped at her face so much. “Petunia, being a good person isn’t about being pretty or special or having magic. It’s… I guess it’s just about doing good things, being kind to other people. And you’ve been very kind to me since I showed up here.”

Petunia sniffed some more but it seemed Holly’s words had stopped the waterworks finally and she gave Holly a watery smile and a quick hug. “You’re a good friend, Holly.”

Holly thought about how she’d wanted herself shot of the Dursleys and how much she hated growing up with her aunt for so long, until said aunt was killed, and ducked her head. “I’m not; I just don’t like it when people like Snape put down people with no magic, or come from families that have no magic. It isn’t right.”

Petunia opened her mouth as if to reply but Lily’s voice calling to them from down the street interrupted whatever she’d been about to say as Lily raced through Spinner’s End on her short eleven-year-old legs to catch up to the two of them. She skidded to a stop just short of bowling her sister over and gasped out for breath for a moment before she threw her arms around her sister.

“Oh Tuney! I’m so sorry Severus told you that!” she cried as she fervently hugged Petunia, who looked a little shell-shocked from her sister’s reaction. Holly gathered Lily had never been one to defend Petunia to Snape in the time they’d known the boy and Petunia might have been feeling left out of her sister’s affections the moment she’d found someone who was magical like her. “He’s wrong, and I don’t think you’re not special at all just because you don’t have magic. I think you’re a wonderful sister and you’re the best and have looked out for me and I think that makes you the most special person!”

Petunia let out a watery laugh as she pulled away from Lily’s undoubtedly sweaty little hug as she wiped at her cheeks and nose again. “Thanks, Lily. Does this mean you’re not going to play with that boy now?”

Lily shook her head emphatically. “He wasn’t very nice to either of you and I told him I wouldn’t be talking to him until he’s apologized.”

Holly wondered if Snape actually will, though Petunia shot her a look that seemed to say this was a pretty common thing between the two friends. She wondered if Snape had always followed Lily around the way he apparently had with her lead, and using mean and sneaky underhanded ways to get around the seemingly innate and exuberant kindness Lily had so he could be petty and mean with the people who held her attention, and then use that to drive them away from her.

“Well, if that’s that, then I suppose we should go back home instead,” Petunia said. “It’s almost lunch time and dad will need our help with the cooking.”

* * *

Mr Evans was taking some leftover meatloaf from the refrigerator when the three of them came back to the Evans home, and he smiled affectionately at his kids when Lily and Petunia immediately started to help around in the kitchen, Petunia starting up the stove to reheat the meatloaf, and Lily going about to set the table and peel potatoes. Holly wasn’t sure how she could help out but Lily quickly put her to dicing up the potatoes she’d peeled as Petunia and Mr Evans worked on reheating the rest of their food.

It was the warmest familial setting Holly had ever seen, as Aunt Petunia had never bothered to share the work of preparing meals with Holly, far preferring Holly to handle all the grunt work and have every little of the reward of tasting the food she’d prepared for the Dursleys later on during meal time, and the only other household Holly had seen had been the Weasleys and Mrs Weasley loved to cook so much that she’d shoo her children out of the kitchen.

The only other time Holly had ever felt comfortable preparing food with other people had been the few weeks she’d spent in Grimmauld Place with Sirius, when she’d sometimes look for a late night meal and Sirius would be sitting in the kitchen, brooding. Sirius hadn’t been much for cooking, having grown up waited hand and foot by house elves, but he knew his way around the magical kitchen of Grimmauld Place well enough to help Holly out in preparing a bit of toast or porridge to stave off hunger pangs in the middle of the night. That had been the most like a family that Holly had felt, and as she seasoned the potato halves now with dried minced garlic and rosemary and basil and thyme, she suddenly found herself missing those rather happy few weeks that she’d spent the summer in Grimmauld Place. Sirius had been depressed and brooding, Holly realized now, though she hadn’t quite understood his alternating snappish behavior with Mrs Weasley and his strange exuberance at having so many people in the grim, old mausoleum of a house with him at the time it was happened, but then she’d been dealing with her own shock and depression over Cedric’s death at that time.

“What’s got you so quiet?” Lily asked at length, as they spread out the potatoes on a wide skillet that would fit into the oven, and then drizzled them with olive oil.

Holly shot her a sidelong glance. Lily was happily arranging the potatoes on the skillet so they made a smiley face. They were so different, the two of them, and Holly wistfully hoped that this time with Lily wouldn’t be taken away from her so quickly, the same way her time with her godfather had been snatched away from her because of her own stupidity and gullibility.

“Nothing,” she said, smiling a little. “I just… I remembered this one summer I stayed over with my godfather once. He lives in this massive old house that was chockful of magic, and he had this house elf who would overcook and over-season the food terribly because he didn’t like my godfather very much, so whenever I’d had hunger pangs at night, which wasn’t too often, mind, I’d cook in this massive magical kitchen of his, and my godfather would try to help out but he was rather terrible at it, since he’d never really cooked much when he was younger.”

“He sounds like a really nice man,” Lily said. “Do you think you can remember his telephone number? Maybe dad can ask the policemen to get in contact with him so he can come and get you?”

Holly shook her head as she sprinkled a bit of onion salt on the potatoes and then shooed Lily away when she came up with oven mitts to place the skillet into the oven, and levitated the skillet with her wand instead. “No, I don’t think Sirius would even know how a telephone works. He came from a very old wizarding family that didn’t like muggles very much. He was nothing like his family, but he also didn’t know very much about how muggles live.”

“Sirius,” Lily said wonderingly. “What a very curious name.”

Holly shook her head as she closed the oven door and glanced at the clock hanging above the kitchen doorway to time the potatoes baking. “Anyway, I don’t think we’ll be able to find him. He died a year ago.”

“Is that why you went to live with your aunt?” Petunia asked curiously, having listened in on their conversation.

“No. He was… he was in prison for a very long time before I’d met him. He’d been accused of killing one of his good friends and getting my parents killed, though he’d had nothing to do with either of it. But then, no one in the wizarding ministry would believe him and he was sent to Azkaban anyway.”

“What’s Azkaban?” Lily asked.

“That’s the wizard prison.” Holly shuddered, remembering how gaunt and utterly hollowed out Sirius had looked when Holly had first met him and he’d offered his home to her, back when they thought his name would be cleared. “He escaped because he found out that the man who’d gotten my parents killed was out to get me in my school and he wanted to protect me.”

“He must have been wonderful,” Lily said. “I’m sorry he died before you got to spend much time with him.”

Holly thought about the Sirius Black of where she was now and wondered how his life fared, in the dark, stuffy halls of Grimmauld Place. The Sirius Black of this time would also only be eleven years old, and nothing of the sad, broken man she’d met, who’d spent far too many years stewing in his own self-recrimination and guilt over his role in James and Lily’s deaths in Godric’s Hollow. She wondered if she would ever get to meet him, wondered if he was anything like the handsome, arrogant boy she’d seen in Snape’s memory, or if he was anything like how Holly had once heard Lupin talk about him—a lonely boy who’d been abused by his bigoted Pureblood parents, and made a pariah within his own family that he’d made a mantle of their insults as a shield of honor to protect him from the hurt and pain of being vilified and hated by his own family once he’d gotten into Hogwarts and Gryffindor House. In a way, her and Sirius’ upbringing hadn’t been very different, only where Holly had been feared and ostracized and considered a freak by the Dursleys, Sirius had been considered a disappointment and a blood traitor by the Blacks. It had been one of the reasons Holly realized much later on, when Sirius had long been dead, why she’d been so drawn to the man when he’d basically let his good sense fail him when he chased after Peter Pettigrew instead of looking after Holly when her parents were killed.

“I wonder if…” She stopped and pulled out her wand and thought of Sirius and the somewhat awkward, hopeful expression he’d had on his gaunt and aged face when he’d told Holly that she could come live with him if she didn’t want to live with the Dursleys. She thought of how her heart had nearly skipped a beat in the excited flush that she would never have to face Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia or Dudley ever again if she came to live with Sirius, and she whispered, “ _Expecto Patronum.”_

The massive, majestic white stag that was her father’s animagus form erupted out of her wand to Petunia’s, Lily’s and even Mr Evans’ flabbergasted faces.

“Go to Sirius and tell him…” she choked for a moment on her words as the prickle of tears threatened to erupt from her eyes the same way the Patronus had emerged from her wand. “Tell him it’ll be fine.”

The four of them watched as Holly’s Patronus, Prongs, galloped away and disappeared, and Mr Evans turned awestruck eyes at Holly first as Lily and Petunia continued to gape at where Prongs had just disappeared through the back kitchen door.

“What on earth was that?” Mr Evans breathed, his tone one of awed wonder.

Holly flushed, unreasonably tired from the complex spell, and once again realized she shouldn’t have shown off with her magic, but then it probably wouldn’t hurt since they didn’t know a Patronus would have been far too advanced for an eleven-year-old to have been able to cast. She hadn’t been able to help herself as she’d wondered whether Sirius was in Grimmauld Place, miserable over how terrible his family was.

“That’s called a Patronus,” she told her audience. Lily was hanging on to her words with undisguised admiration. “It’s used to… I guess to ward off fear and evil, since that’s what Dementors are, but it can also be used to communicate, I guess in lieu of a telephone, since wizards don’t have telephone lines.”

“It’s so magical,” Lily said, still staring after the door even with the Patronus gone. “It made me feel… like I could always be happy and I’d never ever be sad.”

Petunia nodded, though her expression had turned thoughtful. “Do you think he would get the Patronus message in heaven?”

Holly blinked, utterly surprised by the question before she remembered that she’d told them Sirius was supposedly dead. “Eh, I don’t know. Maybe. I guess if a person is no longer alive and you try to send a Patronus to them, the magic would eventually just dissipate without finding a recipient.”

Lily stared at the door, a small smile on her face as she shook her head. “No, somehow, I can feel that he’ll get it, wherever he is. And it’ll make him happy.”

In the heart of London, in an imposing townhouse in the middle of busy Islington, Sirius Black sat, hunkered miserably in the Grimmauld Place basement, next to the food pantry where the house elves kept the supplies of the ancient and noble house of Black. He’d been sent from the lunch table after he’d gotten into an argument with his father, when he’d started to question why Orion Black wouldn’t allow him or his brother, Regulus, to play outside with the neighborhood children, whom Sirius had seen through his bedroom window, as they played Catch 22 or some other sort of keep-away game in the square patch of paved park across from the Grimmauld Place townhouses.

It was an old argument between father and son, one Sirius constantly pulled up whenever he’d seen those kids laughing and playing and he was filled with longing and envy to be able to run out in the sunshine and play with them. Only he, being the Heir to the House of Black, was meant to stay indoors and keep with his lessons and grow up to be a good little wizard who made no associations with the muggle filth that crept up everywhere in London.

They were animals, his father had told him, and when Sirius had been four, he’d accepted this reasoning. At eleven now, he didn’t see how the children outside could be very much different from him. They all had faces and hands and feet and hair, and they spoke English, just like he did. They didn’t have any magic, that was true, but it wasn’t like magic was all there was to being a person, Sirius had reasoned. His mother had nearly hurled her salad fork at him for what she’d termed his blasphemous arguments and yelled at him to confine himself to the basement for the rest of the day, with no food or water. Kreacher, their house elf, had magicked the food pantry locked so Sirius couldn’t sneak a piece of bread from the supplies, and had obediently locked the basement door for Walburga Black with his house elf magic, so no amount of yelling or pleading Sirius made would be heard from the other side.

Sirius sat down, hungry and miserable. The basement was hot and stuffy and the food during lunch had been delicious lamb chops and creamy potatoes, his very favorite, and he wished, for a fleeting moment that he was the type of boy who could keep his mouth shut when he really ought to, just like Mother said Regulus was. But Sirius had never been shy about his opinions, and Father had told him his beliefs and behavior were tolerable as a small child, but Sirius was going to Hogwarts soon, and as such, needed to conduct himself in a manner befitting that of the Heir to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, and that meant no cavorting around Islington Square with muggles.

He’d been in the basement for only about an hour and a half, when suddenly, the most wondrous thing happened. A silver, majestic looking stag materialized through the massive, locked basement door, and it canted around the damp, dark basement of Grimmauld Place, regarding Sirius with an expression that was somehow both kindly and regal at the same time, something which Sirius had never seen with his family, the Blacks’ regal bearing always marred with arrogance and the ingrained belief that they were better than all other wizards for being so pure of blood and utterly magical, from the time the family had been founded in the Dark Ages.

The stag regarded him silently for a moment, before it spoke, oddly, with a child-like female voice. “It’ll be fine, Sirius.”

Sirius scrambled up to his feet and tried to touch the stag as it looked at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen on a magical creature. He had never seen a Patronus up close before, the spell not something that many of the House of Black was able to cast, but he had heard of it from the chatter between his cousins, Bellatrix and Andromeda, when they came to Grimmauld Place with stories of their life and schooling in Hogwarts. They said it was very complex magic, one not even Bellatrix, who had already graduated the year prior, had been able to cast, though she’d scoffed that there was no need for her to cast one since she had no fear of Dementors ever trying to attack a member of the House of Black. Dementors were just creatures the Ministry enslaved to guard Azkaban, and therefore beneath her attention, and there was nothing to fear that she would ever encounter.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as his fingers slipped through the ethereal outline of the Patronus. It looked at him a moment more before slowly, gently disappearing into the darkness of the basement, leaving him alone once again, though this time, no longer angry at his father for arguing about the muggles, or his mother for sending him off without any food for the rest of the afternoon.

The feeling of lightness that the sight of the Patronus conjured up in his heart stayed with him throughout the rest of the boring, lonely afternoon of sitting in the dark and wondering what Regulus had got himself up to. Later, when Kreacher let him out to go and wash up for dinner, his brother looked at him quizzically, because Sirius, when sent to sit in the basement alone always came out looking slightly haunted from spending so much time alone in the darkness, but this time, his grey eyes shone with a lightness that didn’t seem in keeping with the miserable punishment that Mother had given him.

Sirius looked at his brother for a moment, the lightness in his heart shining through his eyes, and smiled and decided the Patronus would be his secret, before he dared Regulus to race with him up the stairs to see who could get to their rooms first. No one had to find out about the secret visit, and Sirius Black would tell no one about the Patronus’ message to him until years later, when another boy called James Potter, learned how to become an animagus with Sirius, and Potter’s animagus came in the form of the same magnificent stag that Sirius had seen in the basement of Grimmauld Place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last update for the weekend; I promise I won't spam you next week. Anyway, meet Sirius Black.


	5. The Evans Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess I lied about not spamming this week. Here, have another chapter.

Mrs Evans telephoned later that afternoon that she unfortunately had been roped in to staying the entire Saturday day-time shift at the hospital in the city of Nottingham where she worked. Consequently, that meant that there would be no outing to London that afternoon, as Mr Evans didn’t like to go on such outings without his wife in tow to help him with his two daughters, especially as both Petunia and Lily might get lost in the massive metropolis as neither of his girls had ever been to London.

This also meant that there would be no celebration of Holly’s birthday, for which Mr Evans apologized profusely, and Holly assured him it wasn’t any problem at all. After all, Holly’s birthday had never really been celebrated with any pomp or celebrity in the years that she’d lived with the Dursleys, and she supposed it didn’t really matter that it wouldn’t be celebrated now. She did miss receiving presents from Ron and Hermione via owl post, though, but Lily and Petunia decided to make her a present since they couldn’t go out to get one for her.

“Here,” said Petunia as she handed Holly a piece of notebook paper torn out from one of her school notebooks from the previous year. There was a drawing of Holly in it, a rather stylized fashion drawing, wearingthe black robes that Lily had told Petunia would be the school uniform if Holly got to Hogwarts with her. Holly knew for a fact that the Hogwarts school robes were rather shapeless things since they were unisex, but Petunia had drawn her like she was wearing some fabulous gown from the pages of the glossy she’d been browsing earlier. Holly had never realized her aunt even knew how to draw, and so well, at that.

There was a level of detail in Petunia’s art that Holly hadn’t thought she’d ever quite see of a muggle drawing a witch in standard robes. The robes she’d drawn were up to Holly’s feet, and the hem was embroidered with some pretty fleur de lis hemming that Petunia had probably assumed looked sufficiently magical to add as a detail. Drawing-Holly wore the standard grey jumper and tie inside the robes, but where Holly remembered her own Hogwarts robes had just fallen about her body like a loose dressing gown, the robes Petunia drew were cinched at the waist with a pretty chainlink metal belt. Holly’s black hair, wild and unruly in its best days, which was why she constantly kept it tied so it wouldn’t look like she’d had a terrible encounter with a tornado or a hurricane, was loose and fell around her face in voluminous curls and waves. Her glasses were still round and somewhat crooked on her nose. And the scar in the middle of Drawing-Holly’s forehead was drawn in red ink, but Petunia had captured Holly’s almond eyes that she’d inherited from her mum, her dark brows that she’d evidently inherited from her father, and the long, slightly hooked nose that marked her Arab ancestry through the Potters. Even the wand in Drawing-Holly’s hand was stylized and beautiful, and reminded Holly of Sirius’ spare wand, which Sirius had told her once had belonged to his grandfather. It had been hard, dark wood, with a fancy, leather covered handle, and had runic carvings on the base of the handle.

She stared at the drawing for a minute before she turned to Petunia and Lily, who were regarding her with somewhat hopeful eyes.

“This is… very beautiful, Petunia! I didn’t know you could draw.”

Petunia preened at the compliment. “I like to copy the styles I see in fashion magazines. This one, I styled after the dress in _My Fair Lady_. I had to add in the jumper and tie though, since Lily said you’ll be expected to wear them inside your robes when you get to Hogwarts. One day, I’m going to make dresses like this.”

“I helped color,” Lily added, rather impishly, and Petunia granted her sister a magnanimous nod of her head to acknowledge her contribution to their gift.

“It’s…” Holly trailed off, not really knowing what to say. She’d never quite received a gift like this, one that was fully handmade and obviously earnestly sincere. Even Ron, who’d come from a family as hard up as the Weasleys had given her sweets and pies baked by Mrs Weasley, instead of handmade cards or presents. Hermione had bought her books and those insufferable study journals that she like to give out to everyone at the start of the school year so that Holly and Ron would be encouraged to study with her, and even Sirius had bought her the Firebolt, though how he’d managed that on the run was beyond Holly’s comprehension. They were all some of the most wonderful, treasured things that Holly had ever received, but none of them had been handmade by any of the givers, and Holly felt utterly endeared that Petunia and Lily, two girls who’d known her for all of a day, had even bothered to make one for her.

“It’s very thoughtful of you,” she said eventually, unable to bring her eyes away from how Petunia had drawn her hair to look so luscious and silky instead of messy and wild. It was a precious thing, to receive something from the child her harpy of an aunt had once been.

“We wanted to draw you with your godfather, Sirius, since you sounded like you miss him so much,” Lily said, “but you never did tell us how he looked like so Tuney couldn’t picture how to draw him.”

“Well,” Holly smiled, utterly endeared as the three of them settled around the kitchen table. “He was very tall, that I could remember. And very thin when I first met him, because he’d just escaped from prison.”

Petunia took the drawing from her and Lily found a pencil from the pocket of her dress. Petunia started to draw as Holly weaved the two girls a picture of how Sirius Black, the man she’d thought would whisk her away from the miserable life she led with the Dursleys, had looked. She tried not to remember how he had been, dirty, disheveled and emaciated, when Holly had first seen him in the Shrieking Shack, but instead, some of the recovered glory of his youth when Holly came to spend her summer before fifth year at Grimmauld Place.

His skin had been pale and waxy still then, stretched taut over his thin, gaunt face, and his grey eyes had been somber and half-lidded, still hiding the horrors he’d endured in twelve years in Azkaban. But Remus had helped him fix his rotted teeth, and his nose and brow still had that beautiful, aristocratic look to them, as had the sharp cliff of his jaw, covered in his neatly trimmed beard. He hadn’t been able to dress in his own robes then, as the only clothing he had left in his childhood bedroom had been from when he was in fifth year and had been too short for him to wear, so he’d taken to wearing his father’s old robes, which were cut in a manner that appeared most definitely dated in 1995, but were probably still fashionable now in 1971. Holly remembered him when he’d dashed into the Department of Mysteries, his wand blazing, to rescue his niece. He’d been wearing dark purple robes of crushed velvet, with a cream-colored silk cravat that was artfully messily tied at his throat. Holly remembered he’d almost looked like he’d been happy again, his eyes glinting silver at the joy he’d found in dueling against Death Eaters, before Bellatrix had hurled that curse that had thrown him across the Veil.

“Who is she?” Lily asked as Petunia studiously shaded Drawing-Sirius’ beard. “Bellatrix. You mentioned her yesterday too, when you were waking up in the woods.”

“She was his cousin,” Holly said, her voice turning hollow. “And she was the one who cast the curse that killed him.”

“That’s so awful!” Lily cried, horrified.

“She was the one who killed my aunt too,” Holly couldn’t help saying, bitterness creeping into her voice. “I didn’t want her to die. I didn’t want Aunt Petunia to die.”

Petunia’s pencil stopped flying over the paper as she looked up to regard Holly with piercing eyes. “Your aunt’s name was also Petunia?”

Holly froze for a moment, discomfited, suddenly realizing her error. “Er, yeah. Petunia Dursley. That’s her name.”

Petunia looked at her for a beat longer, before she nodded and went back to her drawing. Lily still looked like she was horror-struck by the story of how Holly’s godfather and aunt had died by the wand of a single witch, before she shook her head to dispel the heavy moment and looked down at the drawing.

“He must have been rather handsome,” Lily remarked as Petunia moved on to pencil in some of the details of Sirius’ fancy robes borrowed from his father.

Holly nodded, flushing faintly as she remembered seeing wizarding photographs of a young Sirius Black, with her father and Remus Lupin and even a young Peter Pettigrew, who hadn’t looked quite so ratty and sniveling in his youth. “He was, before he’d gone to Azkaban, I think. I saw pictures of him when he was a teenager, and… and a friend of his once told me that all the girls who’d gone to Hogwarts with them had been half in love with him.”

“You sound like you’re half in love with him too,” Lily teased, and Petunia giggled.

“Lily, that’s awful! He was her godfather! That’s like… like us having a crush on Dad!”

“Well,” Lily said as she looked down at what had turned out to indeed be a very dashing drawing of Sirius Black, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Holly ended up with a crush if he looked anything like your drawing, Tuney. Look at that! He reminds me of that one photo of Sean Connery in _From Russia With Love_ , the one from one of your old magazines, Tuney.”

Holly had to laugh at the idea that Sirius could be James Bond, though from the way Lupin had described him as teenager, he probably had been just a little bit.

“I liked to think he reminded me a bit more of Harrison Ford in Star Wars,” Holly said. “He was so scruffy all the time.”

She laughed but then stopped when Lily and Petunia just looked at her a little strangely.

“What’s _Star Wars_?” Lily wondered out loud, and Holly had to curse herself internally as she realized that of course _Star Wars_ likely hadn’t aired yet in 1971. The celebrities that the sisters were cooing over were from the sixties, which Holly really didn’t know very much of, and Star Wars didn’t come out until the late seventies. Lily would have been out of school and married to Holly’s father by then, and fighting a war. She probably would never have seen it, though Holly had been able to gather from all the muggle paraphernalia she’d found in Sirius’ childhood bedroom, he probably would have. Sirius had often snuck out of his family home as a teenager and wandered into movie theaters, hoping to catch a glimpse of muggle real life on the silver screen. Probably, he’d been so bad at understanding muggles because he thought whatever he saw in the movies were what muggles were actually like in real life.

She was fortunately, once again, saved from having to come up with an answer because Mr Evans chose that moment to wander into the kitchen holding a piece of parchment that Holly realized must undoubtedly have come from Professor McGonagall.

“Holly, I have a note from Hogwarts here,” he told her as he joined the three girls at the kitchen table. “I wrote to the teachers there to inquire if you’d been enrolled or if anyone by the Potter name has been enrolled and if there was some way we could contact them.”

He passed her the note and Holly devoured the message with her heart in her throat.

_Dear Mr Evans,_

_I have checked the Book of Admittance as you requested, and can confirm to you that there is only one child enrolled to come to Hogwarts this year, and he is a boy, and not by the name of Holly Potter._

_I have also taken the liberty of contacting Mr Fleamont Potter, the boy’s father, to inquire as to the presence of any relative of his whose parents may have missed to enroll their child into Hogwarts before their untimely deaths. Mr Potter has assured me that there are no other living Potters of a magical heritage in Britain, aside from his family, and that of his brother’s, who also has a son, though the boy is already out of Hogwarts._

_Mr Potter has asked that you get in touch with him as to the matter of this child, and that he and his family would be in Diagon Alley on August 8_ _ th _ _, should you wish to meet with him to discuss the child. It would be greatly beneficial to your daughter, Lily, if you could obtain the supplies she will need for her school, for which I have enclosed another list attached to this note. Should you require guidance, I shall be available to assist you in getting to Diagon Alley on the same day._

_Minerva McGonagall_

_Deputy Headmistress, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry_

“Bummer,” Lily said as she finished reading the note from Holly’s shoulder. “I really thought you mightbe related to this Fleamont Potter, after what Mrs Snape said.”

Petunia sniffed derisively as she turned her attention back to her drawing. “Well, it just shows you what the Snapes actually know about your magical world, doesn’t it? Mrs Snape doesn’t even use magic around her house.”

“But Mrs Snape said Holly looks so much like this Fleamont Potter,” Lily reasoned, still looking let down by the contents of McGonagall’s letter. “You can’t look so much like someone if you weren’t somehow related to them, don’t you think?”

“She’s probably just putting Holly’s face over what she remembers of this man,” Petunia said, her attention now fully back to the drawing. “Didn’t she say she met this Fleamont gentleman back when she was still a girl? And Mrs Snape has to be what? In her forties now. That was a long time ago. Impossible that she would remember what that man had looked like after so long.”

“It’ll be alright,” Mr Evans told Holly, ignoring the small argument that erupted between his two daughters as they bickered over the Snapes. “The 7th is next Sunday, and I think that would give us some time for you to meet with the social worker from the local authorities. If you’re not related to any of these magical families, I’m sure the government would be able to find your family somewhere out here in England.”

Holly didn’t think so, since she was already looking at half of the family she was supposed to have, but wisely refrained from telling Mr Evans so.

“And if they don’t, well, Flora and I have talked a little to see how we can help you more if we’re unable to find your family.” Mr Evans put a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Don’t you worry, Holly, we wouldn’t leave you in the dust if it turns out there’s no one out there left who’s related to do you.” He stood and turned to Lily and Petunia who were still sniping back and forth in furious whispers. “Now, Lily, why don’t you let Petunia finish her drawing? Your mother telephoned earlier to say that she would be bringing home some cake for Holly’s birthday. I think cake sounds marvelous if we bought some takeout to go with it don’t you think? Tuney, you’ll have to stay here with Holly while Lily and I try to whip up a little surprise dinner for her.”

With that, Mr Evans smoothly swept his younger daughter out of the kitchen to get Lily to get ready for a quick nip to the stores, leaving Holly flushed with the idea that the Evanses were going too much out of their way to celebrate the birthday of someone they’d only just met, and it really didn’t make any sense to her how they could be so welcoming and kind.

Petunia didn’t seem to notice her confusion, and was putting in the last finishing touches of detailed shading on her drawing of Sirius. “What did you say his full name was, Holly? Your godfather?”

“Black,” she said distractedly, staring after Mr Evans and Lily as they walked down the hall to get out of the house. “Sirius Black.”

Petunia penciled in a rudimentary calligraphy script of “Holly Potter and Sirius Black, 1971” underneath the two beautifully drawn figures, and started to stand up, announcing that she would just take some of her colored pens from her bedroom upstairs, and would Holly like to help her color the drawing of her godfather. Holly only nodded, far too distracted, and stared down at the beautifully detailed drawing of herself at eleven, perhaps thirteen like when she’d first met Sirius, with beautiful flowing hair, next to her godfather, who didn’t look emaciated and gaunt and haunted at all, and in fact looked rather dashing in the old-fashioned robes and the stovepipe hat perched on his head and let herself be overcome with memories of a life she’d evidently hadn’t managed to put behind her at all.

* * *

Mrs Evans came home that night with a small round Black Forest cake that she’d bought on a discount on her way home from Nottingham, and Mr Evans and Lily had bought steak and kidney pies from the local bakery. Mrs Evans put a single small candle in the middle of the cake, and lit it up with the matches by the stove and she and Mr Evans made Lily and Petunia sing Happy Birthday to a red-cheeked Holly over dinner that night.

It was perhaps the best birthday Holly had ever had, with the tiny party comprised of her mother (even though Lily was only about her age), her grandparents, and her aunt, though none of them knew it and Holly couldn’t tell them either, when she teared up as Mrs Evans handed her the thickest slice of cake after they’d all eaten their fill of the warmed steak and kidney pies. In the end, she settled for telling them that her aunt’s family had never been one for parties, even though they’d hosted a great many lavish ones for Dudley.

Mr Evans also gifted her a wrapped present, which revealed a worn looking Beatles band t-shirt , which he admitted he and Lily had found in a second hand shop on the way to the bakers. The t-shirt was a little too big for Holly’s eleven year old body and she didn’t even like the Beatles, but she hugged it to her chest and was misty-eyed when she hugged her thanks to Mr and Mrs Evans before following Lily and Petunia upstairs to retire for the evening.

There were no more revealing, heart-to-heart bedtime conversations with a teenage Petunia that night, fortunately, so Holly was able to get a good night’s sleep in the camp bed on the floor of Petunia’s bedroom, her belly full of good food, and her heart just as full with the laughter and happiness of the evening with the family she had never known.

The next few days flew by in an idyllic summer haze of the three girls hanging around at home, looking at Petunia’s old magazines, or watching a bit of the grainy staticky pictures on the black and white television. They watched some reruns of an old 1960s Sherlock Holmes TV show with Mr Evans in the afternoons, because Mr Evans was a school teacher and since it was summer and school was out, he had no classes to teach and only lessons to plan for the upcoming year. Lily teased her dad that he looked a little bit like Peter Cushing if he lost a bit of the paunch he’d nursed since the start of the summer, and Mr Evans told his daughters that he thought looking like that straight-nosed, pointy looking Peter Cushing made him look rather dashing, until Petunia pointed out that his hairline was receding far further than the actor who played Sherlock Holmes on television.

On other days, Lily went off to play with Snape, who had given Holly and Petunia the most stilted, desultory apology known to man, and Holly was convinced the boy only apologized because Lily absolutely would not see him at all, even when he knocked on the Evanses door, asking Mr Evans if he could see Lily. It was a little strange to Holly, because Mr Evans evidently did not like Severus Snape any more than Petunia did, but allowed his daughter to go out to play with a boy wizard, probably because Snape was Lily’s first magical friend, and Mr Evans didn’t think he or his family could ever fill in the shoes that Snape had with his friendship with Lily, since neither he and his wife, nor Petunia, had any magic.

Petunia, for her part, was equal parts upset with her sister for forgiving Snape so readily, and delighted that she could monopolize her father and Holly’s attention, whenever Lily went off to play with Snape and refused to join any time Lily extended an invitation to her. Petunia was not an outdoors playing child. She preferred to sit at home looking at her magazines, admiring the dresses and the makeup of the pretty pinup models, or taking a pencil to all of the unused leaves of her previous year’s school notebooks and drawing funky, fashionable outfits on models that Holly thought looked a bit more like Stepford wives, though she would never tell Petunia that, since Petunia had so much fun drawing beautiful fifties inspired clothing and shoes and hats.

“Someday,” she told Holly, when Lily was out on one of her park excursions with Snape, “I’m going to do this for a living.”

Holly looked at her strangely as she watched the pencil flying across the paper expertly. “You mean art? You really should, Petunia. You’re very good at it.”

“No, silly! Fashion! I know I’m never going to grow up as beautiful as the models on Vogue or Woman’s Weekly,” Petunia said, a little bitterly, “but I could work on the fashion, right? That’s what I’m good at.”

Holly remembered that Aunt Petunia had been a gossipy housewife who spent much of her time spying on her neighbors while trying to portray the very picture of tranquil suburban normality, and had a little trouble imagining this young Petunia Evans growing up to be something of a Stella McCartney. The Aunt Petunia she’d known growing up would have been scandalized by the designs that this young Petunia Evans had in her old notebooks, but Holly thought ambition and success was probably what Petunia needed in order to not turn out the bitter shrew her aunt had ended up being, so she said nothing and simply admired Petunia’s work in silence.

At other times, Lily would be home and the three of them would sit in the backyard, sipping cold tea that Mr Evans brewed and sweetened specifically for the dusty, hot summer afternoons, and talked about their hopes and dreams for the future. Petunia, Holly could tell by the tone of her voice, secretly wanted to be a model, but was realistic enough to know that she hadn’t the looks needed to become one and spoke to the two of them about going to a secretarial school so she could have a job as a typist and fund her dreams of setting up her own fashion house.

Lily had next to no idea what sort of careers there were in the magical world, so Holly told her about the options and brochures she’d considered when she’d talked to McGonagall about her career opportunities back in fifth year.

“If I got to go to Hogwarts,” she said, still on the fence about whether she even really wanted to go or not, though it should probably be a foregone conclusion by now, since there was no way someone like her would fit into a regular public school like Petunia did, “I guess I’d probably want to study to become an Auror. My parents’ friends told me they were, my dad was, anyway.”

“What’s an Auror?” Petunia asked. She lounged on the plastic bench in the backyard, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed hat purchased from the second hand store. She’d affixed a massive lilac-shaded flower that she’d scavenged from some old, discarded table ornament from her school, and she wore sun shades that she’d borrowed from Mrs Evans. It was in the massive round, dark styles that were popular in the 1960s. Mrs Evans had told her she’d had those sun shades when she and Mr Evans had met back when she worked waitressing jobs to get herself through uni.

“Something like a wizard policeman,” Holly explained. She had no hat or sun shade, so she had to squint around the glare in her glasses to look up at Petunia and Lily, because she was lying on a towel in the grass. Petunia had told her and Lily that they could pretend to be on a beach in Monaco if they spread out a beach towel in the yard and put an umbrella to block the sun out. Mr Evans had been a little skeptical, since the backyard view was that of another ugly brown brick townhouse block, but Lily had excitedly agreed that they would look very fashionable indeed, wearing identical light yellow sundresses. Holly didn’t want to borrow more of the Evans girls’ clothing and used a _Diffindo_ to cut her massive jeans into shorts, which she then paired with the band t-shirt she’d gotten on her birthday from Mr Evans. Petunia had laughed when she’d first seen her and told her she looked like she was homeless and not wearing trousers, and Holly had just looked at her and said that she was in fact homeless and just living off now through the charity of their parents. Petunia had looked uncomfortable until Lily said they should sit outside and enjoy the sunshine instead.

“Why would you want to be a wizard policeman?” Lily asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to have… I don’t know, a safer job?”

“Well, where I came from, it’s rather dangerous for me, so I guess I want to be someone who can keep other kids like me safe,” Holly said with a shrug. “Also, Ron and Hermione agree I could become an Auror, like my dad. They said I’m rather good at Defense of the Dark Arts.”

“Is that a subject in Hogwarts?” Petunia asked over the rim of her sun shades.

“It is,” Lily said. “What sorts of spells do you know?”

“Well, there’s that Patronus spell I showed you,” Holly said, thinking about the time she’d taught the DA in the Room of Requirement. “My friends and I taught our other friends how to cast it.”

“You have wizard friends?” Lily asked at the same time Petunia said, “I thought you said it was a very advanced spell.”

Holly flushed as she realized she once again was talking about experience she shouldn’t have had if she was a real eleven year old.

“Erm, well, we all had to learn at the time,” she admitted. “There were Dementors in our school in my third year.”

“Dementors in primary school?” Lily asked, horrified. “That’s awful! What did the teachers do? I mean, how could they allow such… such awful creatures in a school of kids younger than ten?”

Shit. Well, now she’d really put her foot in it.

“Surrey must be a dangerous place,” Petunia commented when Holly didn’t say anything more for fear of letting more and more information out that would unravel her story of not being enrolled to Hogwarts, when she’d in fact gone six years of her schooling there.

“Well, I think I’d like to be… what was it that Mrs Snape called that Potter? A potioneer? That sounds interesting,” Lily said. “Imagine being able to make all sorts of potions and putting them all together in a cauldron.”

“It’d be like cooking,” Petunia said, wrinkling her nose to say what words couldn’t what she really thought of cooking.

“I like to cook,” said Lily.

Mr Evans came around the backyard then, wearing his reading spectacles and he smiled at the picture the three girls made, Petunia lounging on the plastic bench, and Lily and Holly sprawled out on a towel on the grass. Their glasses of chilled, sweetened tea were almost empty.

“Girls, I’m sorry to interrupt your little party, but the social worker that the authorities sent is here to see Holly.”

Holly scrambled to her feet and put on the rubber flip-flops that Lily had given to her since Mrs Evans had gifted her a new one at the end of her primary schooling days just before the summer, so Lily was able to pass on her old pair to Holly, whose feet were only very slightly larger than Lily’s, stacking the empty glasses together and taking them inside as she followed Mr Evans into the kitchen.

There was a middle aged woman with mousy brown hair, wearing an equally mousy looking suit, and carrying a thick folder that she set down on the kitchen table as she regarded Holly from behind her cat-eye shaped tortoise shell spectacles.

Holly knew the sort of picture she projected, with the oversized band t-shirt, and the shorts that showed a bit too much of her skinny legs and knobby knees, and the hand-me-down flip-flops, her crooked glasses. Her wand poked out of the pocket of her jean shorts, pinning her t-shirt to her back, and her hair was just slightly wild since she had foregone tying it up so she could enjoy the bit of lie-down she had with Lily in the yard. At least much of the bruises on her face had started to fade from angry reds and purples to a sickly looking yellow-green.

“Holly, this is Ms Wormwood, from the local town government in Cokeworth,” Mr Evans said as he ushered her to sit at the table across from the woman. Mr Evans then moved to serve all three of them a cup of tea, which Holly accepted with murmured thanks, and Ms Wormwood acknowledged with a polite nod.

“Hello Holly,” Ms Wormwood said, and she reminded Holly just a little bit of Professor McGonagall, except she didn’t look quite as perceptive or stern as her old Transfiguration teacher and Head of House. “Mr Evans said you’re staying with his family for the moment since you were found in the woods with your aunt. How have you been doing?”

Holly shrugged and wondered if she was asking how Holly herself was doing living with the Evanses or how Holly was coping with the death of her aunt. “I’m okay. Mr and Mrs Evans are very nice people, and I get along well with their daughters.” Mr Evans beamed at her and Holly smiled back, feeling warm and happy and loved.

Ms Wormwood took off her spectacles and regarded Holly with a thoughtful expression. Without her glasses, her face looked quite naked, like there was something wrong with it, but Holly couldn’t figure out what. “Holly, you must know that your being in the Evans home is a little outside of the protocol we follow with regard to orphaned children. Usually, when the local government is alerted of an orphaned child, we place the child in an orphanage, where they could await to be either fostered or adopted.”

Holly stared shrewdly at the woman. “Do children my age get even adopted in an orphanage where prospective parents can just pick out cute little babies instead of kids who’ve already grown with their own personalities?”

Ms Wormwood looked taken aback by the question for a moment. “Well, Holly, that’s really neither here nor there—“

“But Ms Wormwood, my wife and I are more than happy to take care of Holly,” Mr Evans interjected. “She won’t want for anything here, and I know that Flora and I may look like we don’t have much, but we make enough to take care of our daughters.”

“Are you saying you see Holly as one of your daughters, Mr Evans?” Ms Wormwood asked, her tone suddenly becoming pointed.

Mr Evans looked a little flustered by her tone but he powered through with an answer. “Well, yes, honestly. I know we’ve only had her with us for a few days, but she fits in so well with my daughters, and she’s happy here.” He looked askance at Holly who nodded firmly and smiled. “I think it’s not very kind of you to want to take her to an orphanage where she’ll very likely have to spend more time to adjust.”

Ms Wormwood nodded, though she did not look put off with the reasoning. Holly gripped her wand in her pocket. If Ms Wormwood wanted to push for sending her to an orphanage, she wasn’t above using magic to Confound the woman to get what she wanted, and she desperately wanted to be able to stay with the Evanses.

“I understand, Mr Evans,” she said at length after she’d finished scribbling down some notes into a form that she’d pulled out from her massively thick folder. “Well, I can’t say I’m very pleased with this, since this is highly irregular, but I also can’t fault your reasoning, Mr Evans. This child does appear to be happy where she is, and I can’t, in good conscience, pull a child from a home, where she seems happy to remain, in order to put her in an orphanage.”

She pulled out another form for her folder and handed it to Mr Evans. “I strongly advise, Mr Evans, for you to apply to foster Holly, though, to make her living with your family legal. This way, if she gets lost or comes to any harm, the authorities would know to contact you and your wife.”

Mr Evans took the form and stood and shook Ms Wormwood’s hand. Holly stood as well, though her hand remained on the handle of her wand, at the ready to cast a Confundus spell if Ms Wormwood appeared to change her mind about her decision. She didn’t and Holly could breathe easy once Mr Evans saw her out the door with only a reminder that Mr Evans needed to submit the form within 7 days to the city hall, with a notarized copy of his and his wife’s financial records to ascertain that they were capable of providing for Holly.

Holly looked abashed when Mr Evans turned back to her with a jubilant expression and proceeded to hug the hell out of her. “I guess you’ll be staying here with us indefinitely then, Holly.”

From the foot of the stairs where Petunia and Lily were eavesdropping on the conversation, the two girls rushed to throw their arms around their father and their new sister, Lily even doing a happy little twirl, grabbing Holly by the hands and nearly making her trip with her two left feet because Holly Potter did _not_ know how to dance.

“I’m so happy you’re going to be staying with us! And! Dad and Mum will be able to talk to Professor McGonagall about your schooling! You’ll definitely be going to Hogwarts now!” Lily cried happily.

Petunia was a bit more sedate when she hugged Holly in congratulations. “I’m glad you’re staying. At least I’ll have someone to talk to whenever that Snape boy comes calling for Lily.” She turned to her father. “Dad, if you’re going to foster Holly, does this mean she’s going to be our sister?”

Mr Evans smiled fondly at his older daughter. Petunia always asked the very pointed, very adult questions. “Yes, Tuney. I reckon that means Holly’s going to be your little sister, just like Lily.”

Holly ducked her head, shy with all the attention and jubilation of her stay and she kept quiet and only smiled her appreciation for all the Evanses were giving to her since she’d magically shown up in this timeline, lost and unknown, but now found and known and loved with a family of her own.

When the lights were off later that night, and Lily had already fallen asleep after the excitement of the afternoon with the social worker, Petunia once again leaned over the side of her bed and looked down at Holly with her blue eyes glimmering in the waning moonlight.

“Were you scared they were going ask Dad to send you away?” Petunia asked quietly.

Holly hummed her agreement, a bit more comfortable now in talking and answering Petunia’s rather insightful questions about her. “Yeah. I thought for a moment there…”

“Dad wouldn’t let that happen,” Petunia said. Then, after a while, “Is that why you were gripping your wand the entire time?”

Holly blinked. She hadn’t realized Petunia had seen her holding her wand, fearful that she may have to use magic on a muggle intent on sending her away from this little haven of happiness she’d found.

“I—she didn’t really want to let me stay, I think,” was what she settled for an answer.

Petunia was quiet for a moment. “What were you going to do to her?”

Holly didn’t want to admit that she’d considered casting the Imperius Curse on the social worker if she proved adamant to send her away. But then, Holly wasn’t actually a little girl anymore, and she’d found out the hard way that there were things she needed to fight for if she wanted to keep them, and selfishly, she wanted to keep the Evans family for herself.

“Something bad,” she admitted shamefacedly, but not something she was uncomfortable to tell the girl who would become her aunt.

Aunt Petunia would have understood, she thought. She’d fought for what she needed at the very end. Holly wanted to believe that Lily would understand too, but at this point, Lily was so young and so naïve that she didn’t think she would get why Holly was so tenacious in holding on to this dream family. In time, perhaps, she would, since the Lily Potter of Holly’s timeline had been unafraid to face down a power-hungry, megalomaniac dark wizard intent on achieving immortality, and she would definitely understand that there were times drastic actions would have been called for if the fact that Lily had cast blood wards without Petunia Dursley knowing was any indication. But this innocent child who slept with her hands curled under her chin beside Holly now? She didn’t think so.

“Holly,” Petunia said into the darkness. “I’m glad you’re staying here with us.”

Holly nodded but didn’t answer. She was very glad for it too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of Holly putting her foot in her mouth, and a little bit of setup for how I want this story to end. That's a long way aways, since I'm probably covering the entirety of the first Wizarding war from 1971 - 1980, but eh. Can't do badly with a little setup.


	6. Fleamont Potter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the longest chapter I have written and I have to apologize if it throws the cadence of the fic a little out of whack but I didn't know how to split it up.
> 
> Also formatting that table below? A bitch and a half to do. D:

On Sunday the following weekend, the 7th of August, Holly dressed up in a borrowed dress from Petunia, and then she, Lily, and Petunia were bundled together by Mr and Mrs Evans for the trip to London. The Evanses did not own a car. Mr Evans told Holly this was because there was a bus going directly to Nottingham where Mrs Evans worked, and Mr Evans worked in the local primary school in Cokeworth, so he took the local bus around town.

Going to London meant taking the scheduled bus from the central Cokeworth bus terminal going to the East Midlands train station in Nottingham, and then from St Pancras in King’s Cross, two Tube rides to Charing Cross station. Lily wanted to know if Holly had lived in London at any time considering she appeared so familiar with the travel and train switches that were needed. Holly told her that her godfather’s old house was in London, and let the Evanses take that however they would. It wasn’t actually like Holly spent any time outside of Grimmauld Place in the time she’d stayed with Sirius and the Order, but the Evanses didn’t need to know about that.

Mr Evans, who’d lived in Cokeworth all his life and had only ever been to London when he was much younger, when he went to uni, estimated the trip would take something like four to five hours, and Holly groaned internally at the length of time they would have to be cooped up in a train. She wished she could Apparate instead, but she didn’t really have a license, even though she’d already used Apparition once before, when she’d taken a very weakened Albus Dumbledore from that Inferi cave where they’d attempted to retrieve the Slytherin locket horcrux back to Hogsmeade, but that was just once, and Holly didn’t think she could side-along Apparate four people all at once. Then she thought maybe she could take the Evanses to use the Knight Bus.

She ran up to Lily’s room, where she kept all of the meager belongings she had when she first appeared in this timeline. She checked if her money pouch, which she’d found in the pocket of her jeans along with her wand, had enough sickles and galleons to take all five of them to Diagon Alley. She was in luck: she had about fifteen galleons, seven sickles, and twenty-one knuts to her name. That was enough to get all five of them to Diagon Alley, and if they decided to take the Knight Bus back to Cokeworth, then she still had enough to get all five of them through to home too.

“Holly, dear, come on down,” Mrs Evans called her through the stairs. “I don’t want us leaving too late or the three of you may be too tired to enjoy the London sights.”

“Mum, we aren’t going anywhere but Diagon Alley,” Lily protested as she sat on her bed and pulled her boots on, watching Holly curiously as she counted her money. “How large can one little street be that we need the entire day for it?”

Holly wanted to laugh and tell her that she’d taken an entire afternoon with Hagrid on her first day in Diagon Alley and never even managed to explore everything there was to see, but she refrained as the two of them raced downstairs, and Holly pitched her idea to Mr and Mrs Evans.

“Erm, so I know we’re already planning to take the trains to get to London, but it’s going to take hours just to get there,” she said diffidently. “I—I do have some wizarding money with me and I can take us to use a wizarding means of transport instead, if you’d like? It shouldn’t take very long. I’ve ridden it from Surrey to London a few years ago and it took less than an hour.”

“Wow!” Lily exclaimed excitedly. “Really? We can take a wizard bus to get to London? Oh please, Mum, please let’s go taking the magic bus!”

“Oh, but we shouldn’t have to make Holly pay for all of us!” Mrs Evans protested.

Holly shook her head. “It’s really not a bother, Mrs Evans. I’ve still got enough galleons for a two way ride in case we want to take it back to Cokeworth too.” She tried to grin encouragingly. “It’ll be an adventure if nothing else for all of us.”

Mr and Mrs Evans exchanged a somewhat trepidatious look at the word “adventure” but eventually capitulated at the promise of a much shorter ride. “Oh, all right. But you’ll let us pay you back later once we get to the bank and exchange our pound sterling for your wizard money.”

Holly nodded distractedly as they all went out and stood in the street. It was 10am, but fortunately, Spinner’s End was not a street where the neighbors liked to poke around other people’s business. Holly still peered around cautiously for any wandering muggle eye before she grabbed her wand and stuck it out with her right hand, pointing to the middle of the street. They waited less than a minute before triple decker purple monstrosity that was the Knight Bus came careening down Spinner’s End, stopping with a jolt right in front of the four flabbergasted Evanses.

The door opened and the conductor, another pimply-cheeked teenager not very dissimilar to how Holly remembered Stan Shunpike, emerged to greet them.

“Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board and we can take you to wherever you wanna go. My name is Jeffrey Shunpike, and I’ll be your conductor this fine day.” Jeffrey Shunpike suddenly stopped talking and peered down at Holly. “Well, ain’t you a mite tiny little thing to be flagging down the Knight Bus, little lass.”

Holly looked uncomfortably up at Mr and Mrs Evans, who were staring at the slovenly looking boy who Holly had no doubt was somehow related to Stan Shunpike from her timeline. “Er, my family’s muggle, and I’m the only one with the wand.”

“Well then!” Jeffrey Shunpike said with a clap of his hands as he stepped off the bus to usher the family up into the bus. “Come on up, it’ll be eleven sickles apiece, fifty-five in total, or three galleons and 3 sickles for the lot of you.”

Holly climbed up after Petunia and counted out her money to Jeffrey as Mr and Mrs Evans helped Lily up. Once they were all in and Holly had paid, Jeffrey banged a much younger-looking Ernie Prang.

“Take ‘er away, Ern!”

“Hold on tight,” Holly called after the Evanses as they made their way into the bus, which sped crazily out of Spinner’s End and nearly careened into an exposed rubbish dumpster before the bus magically swept itself out of the way. Lily stared with wide-eyed wonder as Petunia turned green for a moment, then red, before she planted herself firmly onto one of the seats.

The bus wasn’t crowded, with only an elderly looking wizard seated at the front, and a much younger teenage looking witch with luscious dark hair and familiar, heavy-lidded dark eyes huddling next to the window in the back. Holly thought there was something very familiar about her when the witch looked up for a moment to watch the group as they took their seats a few rows from where Ernie and Jeffrey were, but the witch looked away quickly when she found herself being watched and she pulled the dark green silk scarf around her neck and draped it over her head, covering the side of her face that was left exposed by the mass of dark brown curls. She shrugged and turned away when the witch covered her face, and listened distractedly to Lily instead as she chattered excitedly, watching the country scenery speed them by.

The ride to the Leaky Cauldron in Charing Cross Road took just over an hour, cutting their one-way trip to about a third of what it would have been on the best of conditions. By the time the five of them alighted, everyone was mostly glad they were off the bus. Petunia still looked a little green around the gills and even Mr Evans was a little unstable on his legs when they got off.

Holly noted that the witch who’d seated at the back of the bus had gotten off before them somewhere in Islington, near where Grimmauld Place should have been and she wondered if the girl she had seen was Andromeda Black, returning home from a rendezvous with her muggleborn boyfriend. That had been a favorite story of Sirius’ to tell about his strong-willed cousin who defied the Black family and eloped with a muggleborn before they could marry her off to one of her cousins.

Mr and Mrs Evans and Petunia couldn’t see the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron, and whatever muggle-repelling charms were cast were making them want to tug Lily and Holly away from the run-down looking shopfront. Holly shook her head and tugged insistently at Mrs Evans and Petunia, while Lily took her dad’s hand.

“It’s this way,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been here before.”

They managed to pull Lily’s reluctant muggle family into the small, dingy pub. This early on a summer morning, there were very few patrons and Holly was quick to spot Minerva McGonagall, who sat straight-backed and tall in one of the booths. She wore a tall black witch’s hat that complemented her dark blue robes and she was rather surprised to see the Evanses show up, probably had not expected them to be there for another two or three hours.

“Hello, Professor McGonagall,” Lily greeted as the five of them walked up to the tall witch. She was clearly still in the middle of brunch, with a spread of roast hog and House Leaky Soup set before her, and invited them to sit with her and ordered tea for everyone all around.

“Hello, Ms Evans,” she greeted Lily and repeated her greeting to her parents and sister. “I must apologize, I had not expected you would be here for at least another hour, and expected I would have some leisurely time to enjoy an early lunch before I went off to meet with you in Charing Cross Station. As I understand it takes a fair bit of time to travel by muggle means from Nottingham to London.”

“Oh, please don’t hurry up your meal, Professor,” Mr Evans said very politely. “Holly here decided to show us the ingenious ways of wizard transportation.”

“Ah,” said Professor McGonagall as she wiped her mouth with a napkin and turned to regard Holly. “Is this the child you mentioned in your message, Mr Evans?”

“Yes, ma’am. Her name is Holly Potter. She and her aunt were in a spot of trouble in the woods bordering our town last week. Her aunt passed away, so my wife and I are fostering her until we’re able to help her find her remaining family.”

McGonagall looked closely at Holly from the rim of her round gold spectacles. “She certainly looks like a very young Henry Potter as I remember him from my own days in Hogwarts. Except the eyes, I think. I’ve never heard that the Potters had green eyes in anyone in their family.”

“It’s like mine,” Lily said, and Holly was surprised because Lily had never really mentioned that their eyes looked so alike, though growing up, Holly had heard all about it enough from every witch and wizard she’d ever met who knew Lily Potter.

“Yes,” McGonagall said, her eyes still on Holly. “Quite. So, you took your foster family to take the Knight Bus, Ms Potter?” Holly nodded and McGonagall gave her another one of those piercing looks from over the rim of her glasses. “And how did you manage this if you’re not enrolled at Hogwarts? You should not have had a wand just yet.”

“I have a wand,” Holly said, rather sullenly, when Lily nudged her to procure her wand, which she pulled out from her pocket and placed on the table.

McGonagall looked at the wand but did not touch it. “And how did you come by this wand, young lady?”

“I bought it,” Holly said, only a tad defensively. “In Ollivander’s. With the money my parents bequeathed me.”

“Oh Professor, I must have forgotten to say,” Mr Evans said, a little abashed, “Holly’s parents passed away when she was very young, but she assures us they were both magic.”

McGonagall nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that, Ms Potter. You’ll be glad to hear that the current Potter patriarch, Fleamont, has scheduled an appointment at Gringotts today at one o’clock. He’s most eager to find out if you are indeed related to them.” Then the stern expression in her steely blue eyes softened and she smiled. “Regardless, whether or not you are related though, Hogwarts will be glad to extend an invitation to you. Young magical minds must be educated in the ways of magic lest your magic go awry and devour you.”

Holly wanted to say that she had seven OWLs to her name and she was very well-educated in the ways of magic, thanks in no small part to McGonagall herself, but thought that the professor might think her crazy since it was obvious that this version of McGonagall had never met her in her life, and she looked all of eleven. Probably, even wizarding prodigies didn’t have OWLs at eleven.

“What about my schooling fees, Professor?” she had to ask. “I can’t ask Mr and Mrs Evans to shoulder this on top of what they already have to spend to feed an additional mouth in their household.”

McGonagall turned those stern eyes to her again, regarding her keenly, though Mrs Evans protested rather vociferously that it was no trouble for her and her husband to work additional shifts or jobs to make ends meet to send two children off to Hogwarts, but McGonagall simply raised a hand to stop their protests.

“There are scholarships to aid the orphaned and disenfranchised, Ms Potter, just as there are in every humane society. The Ministry and the Hogwarts Board of Governors provide financial assistance to the families of students who have lost their breadwinner so that they may continue their schooling, at the very least up to the Ordinary Wizarding Level. You needn’t worry that you won’t be able to afford school; magic will always take care of its own.”

Holly stared back into McGonagall’s eyes willing her to understand what she couldn’t put into words, but she had no skill in Legilimency and she doubted McGonagall would attempt it on her either. She had never been the sort, so she merely nodded.

Mr and Mrs Evans chatted some more with the professor, about what they could expect from sending both Lily and Holly off on their first year, but Holly grew bored of the conversation, having already gone through multiple years of schooling in Hogwarts. She tried to see whether Lily was interested to go exploring early, but Lily was entranced by the conversation between the adults, so she turned to Petunia instead, who was looking at both Lily and Holly with undisguised envy.

“Are you all right?” she started to ask, but then decided that was a stupid question. Of course Petunia wouldn’t be all right. They’d practically gotten a confirmation that Holly would be sent away to magical boarding school along with Lily and that would mean Petunia would be left alone in Cokeworth to continue her boring public school education. “Sorry, that’s a stupid thing to ask. I meant, I’m sorry if this means I won’t be able to stay with you for much of the school year.”

Petunia scowled and for the first time, Holly thought she saw a glimpse of the unpleasant woman she remembered Aunt Petunia to be. “Why wouldn’t I be all right? I’ll still be going to secondary school, won’t I? And I have friends in my school who are like me, who don’t need magic at all.”

“That’s not what I meant, Petunia, and you know it.” She sighed. “I know it must feel… I know it’s hard to feel like you’re being left behind but that isn’t what Lily is doing to you. You know she’ll always still come back home to be with you and Mr and Mrs Evans at every holiday,and you know she’s not going to forget you, but it’s important for her to get a proper education. An uneducated witch or wizard is a dangerous person. You heard what McGonagall said.” She carefully edited herself out of her statement, knowing that really, it was Lily Petunia was jealous of, since Lily was her real sister, and the one who’s going off into an adventure without her. It just made it worse that the one friend the both of them shared—Holly—would be going off with Lily too.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Petunia said sullenly, looking away.

“We’ll write to you every chance we get, and send you our lessons if you’re curious about it,” Holly offered, knowing, more than anything, that Petunia craved to learn what it was Lily was also learning, but Petunia shook her head.

“No, I probably wouldn’t even understand what you’ll study,” Petunia said, not quite mollified but no longer looking like she was spoiling for a fight. “I’m going to be busy anyway. Year 9 is going to be busy and… and I’ll have friends who’ll want to spend time with me…”

Lily evidently had stopped listening to the adults and had caught the tail end of Petunia’s little pity party and she turned to her sister, looking sympathetic and sad. “Oh, Tuney, you don’t have to feel sad. Holly and I will spend all the time we can with you all of our summers and on Christmas hols! I promise we won’t do any magic and we’ll do all perfectly normal teenage stuff like you want to.”

“Quite, Ms Evans,” Professor McGonagall interjected as she stood up and left a galleon and a handful of sickles to pay for her meal. “As it is, once you start at Hogwarts, you will not be allowed to perform any magic outside of the school until you are of age. This is to ensure that young people such as yourself can only perform magic in a controlled environment where you are not liable to hurt yourself or others who may not have the capability to counter your magic. There is a Trace the Ministry puts on wands purchased for school age children to monitor this, so I assure you, there will be no wand-waving from your sister and foster sister when they are home for the holidays with you.”

Holly thought McGonagall may have completely missed the point with Petunia but Petunia only nodded and stood up. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

Lily exchanged a glance with Holly and the two of them sighed and went to follow Petunia, who had left the table already to follow Mr and Mrs Evans outside to the rear courtyard where the entrance into Diagon Alley was. Holly had a feeling it would take a fair bit of groveling before Petunia was mollified, but at this point, it wasn’t really her place. Petunia was mostly angry with herself for not having been born with magic, and jealous of her sister, because it seemed to her like Lily was getting everything: the magic itself, the opportunity to go to some magical boarding school, the company of their new friend. Holly could sort of understand that it must feel like she was really being left out and it didn’t help that Mr and Mrs Evans were so wide-eyed with all of the magic that went on around them as McGonagall tapped the right bricks and the plain wall behind the pub transformed into a grand archway that led into Diagon Alley.

Petunia looked like she wanted very much not to be impressed by the whimsical, utterly magical air that seemed to permeate Diagon Alley, but found it impossible not to be moved into awe as the four Evanses stood and tried to take in everything about Diagon Alley: from the brightly colored robes of all shapes and sizes worn by witches and wizards who were out in full force on such a lovely summer day, to the colorful and almost absurd shopfronts that showcased the wondrous and magical, the fantastical and terrible.

Holly looked around, impressed that Diagon Alley in 1971 was so vibrant. She recalled with a pang her own first experience coming to the wizarding quarter of London with Hagrid, how fantastical everything had been, and then remembered what Diagon Alley had looked like at the end of her sixth year, when the street had been empty, with most of the shopfronts boarded up, people far too afraid of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. It had been like Voldemort’s presence had sucked out everything that was good and that could be appreciated about magic, and Holly suddenly remembered that before she’d been transported to this time, she’d had a quest bequeathed to her by her dead mentor and headmaster.

1971 Diagon Alley didn’t look like it needed saving, but Holly knew it was only a matter of time before the First Wizarding War broke out, and she was perhaps in prime position to be able to prevent that. Maybe not now since she was solely dependent on the generosity of the Evanses and she was basically stuck in the body of an eleven-year-old, but it was probably something she had to work towards, and she was most lucky that in this time, Dumbledore was alive and well and hopefully in a position to help her.

Their little group had so far gone through looking at the shopfronts like small town yokels for a while until they found themselves in front of Gringotts and McGonagall cleared her throat to catch the attention of everyone in the group.

“Well, here is the bank, Mr Evans,” McGonagall said and Mr Evans ushered his wife and children and Holly towards where McGonagall stood. “Your appointment with Mr Potter is in another ten minutes. I would suggest that one of you take your daughters off to do the shopping for young Ms Evans’ supplies for her first year, and the other may accompany Ms Potter for the meeting.”

“I’ll be fine, I won’t really need anyone to go with me,” Holly tried to protest, but Mrs Evans shushed her.

“We’re responsible for you, dear, of course one of us will go with you.” She turned to Mr Evans. “Mike, love, why don’t I take the girls off to Flourish and Blotts; it looks like the right place for them to get Lily’s school books, and you take Holly here to Gringotts. We can get them fitted for robes after your meeting.”

“I want to go with Holly,” Petunia suddenly said. She’d been quiet and a little sullen since they’d left the pub and only spoke up now.

“Are you sure, Tuney?” Mr Evans asked. “I’m guessing since Gringotts is a bank, then the discussions might be boring for you.”

Petunia shook her head. “No, I want to find out if Holly’s related to this Potter gentleman, like what Mrs Snape said.”

“Snape?” McGonagall queried. Evidently, Snape’s name was unfamiliar to her.

“I think she was related to the Princes,” Holly said quietly.

“Ah, yes, I remember her now. Eileen Prince. Her family had been so disappointed when she’d gone on to marry a muggle two decades ago. Mr Evans, you may go in and inquire with the goblins inside as to the meeting with Mr Potter. I shall accompany Mrs Evans and young Ms Evans to pick up their books.”

“There are goblins inside? I want to go with Holly too, Mum!” Lily said but Mrs Evans shook her head and shushed her, so Mr Evans took Petunia and Holly together, while McGonagall, Mrs Evans and Lily went on towards Flourish and Blotts and Holly looked back for a while to stare after Lily’s back before she allowed herself to be swept in to Gringotts.

Inside was no different from how she remembered Gringotts looked. It was a Sunday and looked to be a slow day for wizard banking. There were no queues in the tellering high counters, so Mr Evans, Holly and Petunia walked up to one of the open windows. Mr Evans looked like he was utterly fascinated to be meeting a goblin for the very first time, but Holly knew better than to gawk at the goblin at the counter, who squinted indifferently at them.

“Holly Potter here to meet with Mr Fleamont Potter and his account manager, please,” she said as politely as she could manage.

The goblin at the counter stared down at her and then looked disdainfully at Mr Evans and Petunia, and sniffed. “Very well, come with me.”

The goblin emerged from the high counter and led them through the various tables and counters, past the private and well-protected rooms used by the curse breakers, towards a set of elegant marble-columned rooms that were no doubt used by the account managers with their high profile clients. Holly hadn’t warranted such a meeting when she’d first gone to Gringotts with Hagrid, since Hagrid already had the key that was needed to access Holly’s vault and they really only needed to draw a bit of money for Holly’s school needs, but she supposed this was a very different sort of meeting with an account manager, since it was, she supposed, a familial relation verification, which Holly thought was a very strange thing to conduct in a bank. Muggles usually went to the hospital to get a DNA test to prove familial matches; Aunt Petunia’s afternoon dramas always had scenes of pregnant women swooning in the hospital when there was a paternity match with the leading man. She supposed, even with the years she’d spent living as a witch, she would never quite understand wizarding culture.

The goblin who led them into the meeting room announced their names even though Holly hadn’t introduced Petunia or Mr Evans and she wondered if there’d been some sort of charm that had taken their names when they entered Gringotts.

Inside the meeting room was another goblin, dressed in grey robes that Holly found looked rather familiar, with his hands folded on the massive marble table that separated him from a tall, thin rather aged looking gentleman with the funniest looking mess of greying hair that she’d ever seen. He wore large round spectacles and fine dark red robes that reminded Holly of the sort of robes Sirius favored when he’d been locked up in Grimmauld Place, and even if Holly hadn’t known what her father, James Potter, had looked like, she would have recognized the man as a Potter himself. He had the same brows, nose and chin as Holly had, though his jaw was far more square than hers, and his skin definitely more tan, his eyes a little more deep set.

Mr Potter turned a cordial smile at them as they were ushered into plush leather chairs that Holly felt dwarfed in. Mr Potter extended a hand to Mr Evans who shook it firmly.

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, Mr Evans. I’m Fleamont Potter, as you might have guessed. I’ve asked my Gringotts account manager, Griphook, to oversee the casting of the genealogy ritual for your charge, Ms Potter, to verify if she does indeed belong to House of Potter.”

Holly wanted to gape at Fleamont Potter’s posh accent and obviously expensive, tasteful attire, at the gold ring in the smallest finger of his left hand that identified him as the family patriarch. He had the look of a scholarly sort of bloke about him, but dressed in the fancy robes and surrounded by the grandiosity of Gringotts, there was no mistaking that Fleamont Potter was a very affluent wizard belonging to a rather powerful wizarding family. It made Holly feel like she and Petunia and Mr Evans were severely underdressed in Mr Evans’ casual working class jeans, work boots and collared shirt, and Holly and Petunia in their clean but rather worn peasant frocks.

“Yes, thank you for meeting with us too, Mr Potter,” Mr Evans said politely, and then proceeded to introduce the two girls. “This is my oldest daughter, Petunia, and this here is Holly.”

Mr Potter turned from Mr Evans and his daughter to regard Holly with large keen eyes behind his round glasses, smiling when it seemed he’d seen something he found familiar and liked it very much. He bent his knees a little so that he was eye to eye with Holly and for a fleeting moment, Holly was utterly annoyed with the fact that she was in an eleven year old’s body instead of how she’d been at seventeen. She hadn’t been tall by any means, but she certainly hadn’t been such a little midget and she hated that it felt like Mr Potter was going to talk down on her even though he didn’t when he started to speak.

“Hello Holly,” he greeted and his voice was very kind. “Professor McGonagall fire-called me when your foster father wrote to her to ask about any familial relations you may have in magical Britain, and since you carry the Potter name, I thought it might be best to request Gringotts to prepare a genealogy ritual to trace any relation you may have to the Potter family.”

Holly bit her lip to keep herself from blurting out that she most definitely was related to the Potter family; in her time, she’d been the last of the Potters in all of Britain. It probably wouldn’t do to tip her hand this early, though she was a little wary as to the ritual that would be performed. What if it told Fleamont the truth?

When she didn’t say anything, Mr Potter straightened with a smile. “Well, we shall start shortly, Griphook. I’d like to take some time to explain to Mr Evans the details of the ritual, as I gather he is a muggle and would not have much of an idea what we magical folk do.”

“The ritual is a simple one, I assure you. Griphook will need to take a little bit of Holly’s blood, and a little bit of mine into a ritual bowl. There will be some potion ingredients that will be added. Once it is ready, Griphook will chant over the potion in Gobbledegook and then the potion will be soaked over into a piece of parchment, and it will print if Holly and I are related, along with a genealogy of all the magical folk in the querent’s familial background. Should Holly and I not be related, this will help you identify if she is related to any other magical families here in Britain. I hope that will assist you in finding her magical family should it turn out that she’s not entirely muggleborn.”

“I’m not,” Holly muttered under her breath, a little nervously. Beside her, Petunia took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

With the explanations done, Griphook cast a spell that caused a black stone bowl to appear in the middle of the massive desk. Griphook started to prepare the base of the ritual potion, adding in the purified water, and a bunch of other ingredients Holly was far too distracted to pay attention to what it may have been, and it wasn’t entirely like she cared, having never really been all too interested in Potions as subject, but Petunia was mesmerized, as was Mr Evans.

“The primary querent’s blood shall go first,” Griphook declared and gestured for Holly to come forward, handing her a silver-edged ritual knife. “Cut in the middle of the palm, a dram of blood into the solution.”

“That sounds like a lot for a child,” Mr Evans commented though he thankfully didn’t stop Holly as she took the knife and cut it into her left palm and measured out sixty drops of her blood into the ritual bowl, then pulled her hand back, clenching it into a fist so as to hide the wound.

“Here, child,” Mr Potter said as he took her hand and pointed his wand. “ _Episkey._ ”

The small cut in the middle of her hand healed instantly and Holly collapsed back into the plush chair behind her, the blood-letting too much for her tiny prepubescent body to take at short notice. Petunia sat beside her and patted her arm a little awkwardly in commiseration.

“Ten minims of blood from the secondary querent,” Griphook said, and Mr Potter took the knife, cleaned it with his wand, and pricked a small wound on his left hand, counting out ten drops of his blood, before pulling his hand away, and healing his own cut with a murmured spell.

Griphook paid the humans no mind as he then continued to add potion components into the mixture and Holly couldn’t help but glance apprehensively at Mr Evans to check what he made of this bizarre ritual as Griphook began to chant.

“It’ll be all right, dear,” Mr Evans said quietly as he offered his own comforting hand to Holly, who took it gratefully. Across from them, Mr Potter gave them what Holly took to be an apologetic smile for all the pomp and celebrity that the ritual required, but said nothing otherwise, though he kept his eyes trained on Holly, as if puzzling out her appearance.

Presently, the solution in the ritual bowl began to sizzle and smoke, though there was no fire.

“It is ready,”Griphook declared, and promptly threw a foot of parchment into the bowl to soak in the potion. “It will take fifteen minutes. Only the querents may stay to view the results.”

Mr Evans started to protest but Holly assured him quietly that she would be okay, and he and Petunia departed with Griphook, leaving Holly alone in the room with Mr Potter, who was still looking at her like she was a very interesting specimen of ashwinder whose scales he would like to harvest for his own potions.

Holly cleared her throat, uncomfortable with the scrutiny, though she knew this man to be her other grandfather, and the man who had taken in a runaway Sirius Black when he’d been disowned by his family. Logically, she knew Fleamont Potter must be a kind man, but she couldn’t help but be apprehensive over his reaction if the truth of Holly’s parentage were to come out. His son was no older than she was at this time and it would take a fair bit of explanation, half of which Holly herself didn’t even understand, which was why she never chose to dwell on it.

“I’d like to tell you, Ms Potter,” Mr Potter said as he cut his eyes to the parchment soaking in the solution when he realized Holly was discomfited by his stare, “that regardless of what that parchment may say, I’m fairly certain within my own blood that we most definitely are related. However, I can see that you have formed some attachment to the Evanses and far be it for me to ask of you to leave the family of your choosing.”

Holly could only nodded, her heart caught in her throat as she watched words coalesce in the previously blank parchment. Her name appeared first in sharp red script at the top. In smaller script below, Mr Potter’s name, followed by the words “familial match, paternal grandparent.”

Holly collapsed back on her chair as Mr Potter’s eyes, already large and wide, bugged out to almost impossible proportions as he took the finished parchment and read its contents before he too felt his knees buckle and he had to sit back in his own chair, his eyes as round as saucers behind his glasses as he stared at the contents of the parchment with disbelief slowly overcome by confusion.

“Ms Potter… Holly,” he said, and this time his voice was strained. “How is this possible? The Department of Mysteries have made very little progress on the study of the Hour Reversal Charm, and even that is an impossible explanation for this, as the charm can only turn back time in small increments of up to an hour!”

Holly fidgeted, unsure as to how she would explain and she took a deep breath, and tried to channel that swot in her that Hermione was always harping must reside in her and Ron or they would never have passed their OWLs. Of course, she wasn’t a swot and had only the very basics of Magical Theory under her belt, so she had no idea what to say.

“Erm, I don’t really know either, sir,” she said. “One minute I was captured by Death Eaters and facing down the Killing Curse, and the next, I was, well, here. Mr Evans’ children found me in the forest outside their home.”

“Good Godric! And Mr Evans’ daughter is your mother?”

Holly shook her head. “No, not Petunia. Mr Evans has another daughter, she’s muggleborn, I guess you already know that. She and her mum, I mean… my grandmother… they’re outside, shopping for her supplies for first year in Hogwarts.”

“As are James and Euphemia,” Mr Potter said wonderingly, still utterly astonished with the contents of the parchment. Holly reached out and he handed her the piece of parchment and she read it through, curious beyond the telling as to her own ancestry.

Holly Jamie Potter  
(Querent)

Fleamont Potter  
(Secondary Querent)  
 _Familial match, paternal grandfather_

James Fleamont Potter  
(Father)

| 

Lily Jane Evans  
(Mother)  
  
---|---  
  
Fleamont Potter  
(Paternal Grandfather)

Euphemia Greengrass Potter  
(Paternal Grandmother)

| 

Michael Evans  
(Maternal Grandfather)

Flora Levin Evans  
(Maternal Grandmother)  
  
Henry Potter   
(Paternal Great Grandfather)

Heloise Shafiq Potter  
(Paternal Great Grandmother)

|   
  
Addison Potter  
(Paternal Great Great Grandfather)

Prudence Abbott Potter  
(Paternal Great Great Grandmother)

|   
  
And on and on it went.

Holly stared at the parchment, at the long list of Potters and Greengrasses and Shafiqs and Macmillans and Abbotts and other wizarding names she was related to feeling utterly boggled at the long family lines and convoluted branches of the Potter family, stretching, she guessed, as far back as the Middle Ages. She was reminded, rather forcefully, of the Black Family Tree that had occupied a massive section of the wall in the Grimmauld Place library, where Sirius’ name had been blasted out. There were no such holes in her family tree on the Potter side.

“You’re my granddaughter,” Fleamont said, his voice so full of wonder and he surged out of his chair and fell to his knees so he could throw his hands around Holly’s shoulders and hug her. Holly thought Fleamont Potter hugged exactly like Mr Evans, warm and kind and made Holly feel like she would be kept forever safe, that she found herself willing to spill any information as to how she came to be here. “Please, child, Holly, tell me what year you were born?”

“1980,” she said as she threw her own arms around Mr Potter, hugging him back. “I’m… I’m supposed to be seventeen years old, but… something happened. I was attacked, and when the Death Eaters cast the Killing Curse that ended Aunt Petunia’s life, I—I’m not really sure. It must have been accidental magic, I suppose. I wasn’t holding my wand… I… I think I must have passed out from the resulting magical backlash. When I woke, I was in the forest, and my aunt was dead. I was, I suppose you could say I was de-aged, and there were these two girls who found me, they said, by following some strange red and gold butterflies.”

“Great Merlin,” Mr Potter exclaimed. “And you say you were attacked by these people you call Death Eaters? With the Killing Curse? Oh you poor child!”

“Yeah, the Death Eaters. Are they not known as much in this year yet? They’re followers of Voldemort—“

“No, they are not, but that name I remember,” Fleamont said as he finally let Holly go though he pulled himself up to sit on a chair next to her instead. “I’ve heard rumblings over the past years of a self-styled Dark Lord who seeks to reform wizarding society in the image that Grindelwald envisioned for magical Europe, but I’d not heard that his followers have attacked people, especially innocent children, or that they have taken to calling themselves Death Eaters.”

“They’re out in the open in my time,” Holly told him. “He broke them out of Azkaban, the lot of them, and then attacked Hogwarts in my sixth year. They killed Professor Dumbledore before the year was out… I—“ She had to stop talking as she found her eyes had filled with tears, the lump in her throat that had started small at the start of the ritual growing until she could no longer speak. “He killed my parents—!”

“My James?” Mr Potter asked. Holly could only nod as she blinked back her tears, unwilling to cry over things she’d reconciled to herself that she couldn’t prevent. She’d been a baby when James and Lily Potter had been killed in Godric’s Hollow. She’d been powerless to stop Snape from killing Dumbledore. But she was back in time now, and maybe, just maybe, with her having told her grandfather, this magical powerful man who had the means and reach and resources to rally the wizarding world against Voldemort, she could prevent the outcome that had resulted in two full scale magical wars that spanned decades.

Fleamont held her until she managed to master herself and stood only when he was assured that she was not going to cry again. “It is a terrible future, where you are from, my child, and I promise you, I’ll find a way to help you prevent it. But that is neither here nor there. Right now, you’re eleven years old, and only at the beginning of your schooling. I know it must feel like a rehash of the years you’ve already spent in Hogwarts, but if I can gather enough from your story, it’s that you have not had the best of years studying in that school, with a power-crazed madman and his followers after you. You must enjoy what second chance of a childhood you’re afforded, Holly. These chances, they do not come around to everyone, and I think your aunt, who’d protected your life before your magic flared, had afforded you that second chance to relive a youth that had been robbed from you.”

He smiled warmly, when Holly only stared at him, and he pressed a broad thumb against the corner of her eye, where a tear threatened to spill. “Go back to Hogwarts, Holly. Spend your years there with your father and your mother, whom you were never able to get to know in your life from the time you came. If you must, treat them as siblings for now, but do not tell them the story you’ve told me. Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time. But I think with your warnings now, meddle we must, but in the right manner to assure your safety. I’ll not let a hair be harmed on your body, you or your father or your mother. Let me try to handle these things for you. I’m an old man now, but I think there’s still a good measure of respect afforded to the Potter name in the Wizengamot and in our greater society. Allow me to fight in your stead, on an arena where I am certain we will win.”

Holly found herself nodding to the firm conviction she could hear in her grandfather’s voice. “You have to tell Headmaster Dumbledore! I remember—everyone told me that in the first war, he’d formed a secret organization that was geared towards defying Voldemort. I don’t know if he’s done so this time; I’ve been living with the Evanses all this while and they don’t have any connections to the wizarding world, but if they haven’t, then Professor Dumbledore will surely know how to manage the threat of Voldemort.”

“That I will do,” Fleamont agreed. “And I’m sure you will do as well when you get to Hogwarts yourself. But for now, Holly, I think the more pressing concern we must address is what you want to do with what we’ve discovered. Naturally, I would be delighted to welcome you to my family. You and my James look so alike, and my son would benefit from having a sibling. But I know you are already living with your mother’s family, and I will not begrudge that of you. How do you want me to handle your maternal grandfather, if he should ask if we are related?”

Holly stared and realized she was being asked to make a decision as to whether she wanted to go with her mother’s family or her father’s…. And found that she couldn’t. She wanted them both. But in this time, James Potter and Lily Evans didn’t even know each other. They would not have gotten together until their seventh year, at least according to the stories Sirius had told her.

“I… I don’t know what to choose. Mr and Mrs Evans have already signed papers from the muggle authorities to declare that they’re fostering me, sort of like a temporary adoption, I guess.”

Fleamont smiled, a kindly, understanding smile, the one that would come from a grandfather, because he was, and he was real and he was here. “I don’t think I would ever be able to deny you, Holly, not a child that is the blood of my son. Why don’t I tell Mr Evans that you are a cousin of James’? Perhaps from the continent, yes, that should quite do. There are still a number of magical Potters out in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and there definitely are many relations of ours in Turkey. I could tell Mr Evans that you are my son’s, ah, second cousin once removed, should do it. I know that you feel you might not have spent enough time with the Evanses, and I will not begrudge the time you have now with them. I should think you may want to stay with them for the rest of your summer. But I want you to know that the Potter Manor will always be open to you, and I should hope that you will feel the desire to come to visit sometime so I may introduce you to your grandmother. And when you get to Hogwarts, all I ask is that you make an effort to befriend the boy that would have become your father.”

“Of course, sir,” Holly replied.

Mr Potter grinned at her impishly, that smile that Holly had only seen in photographs that Sirius had taped in his childhood bedroom in Grimmauld Place, of his time with the Marauders, with James Potter. “When we are alone, I should like for you to call me Grandfather, or Grandpa would do.”

Holly reached out to hug the man again, this time of her own volition. She wasn’t a very tactile person, having grown up with very little affection from the Dursleys, but she found herself reaching out again and again for these people who were the family she’d been denied.

“Thank you, Grandpa.”


	7. The End of Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, you guessed it. New chapter, with Snape being his usual asshole self, Holly flexing her Seeker reflexes, and a drive-by baby!Regulus cameo.

Mr Potter took over explaining to Mr Evans the small subterfuge that he and Holly had agreed on so that the Evanses would remain unaffected by whatever magic it was that brought Holly to 1971 which was just as well for Holly as she couldn’t bring herself to lie anymore to the Evanses about who she was. Mr Evans was anxious as to whether the Potters would take the new daughter he’d just welcomed into his family, but Mr Potter assured him that while Holly was indeed related to the Potters, they would not dream of interfering with the Muggle authorities, as Holly had already been signed away by the muggle government to the Evanses and the Potters did not like to interfere with muggle affairs. This seemed to placate Mr Evans’ anxiety and after a moment, the two men shook hands. Fleamont bent to give Holly another hug which she returned enthusiastically.

“I will take care of the threat that brought you here, Holly,” he whispered into her ear. “You take care that you enjoy this new childhood that has been afforded to you.”

Holly nodded and shut her eyes at the wave of emotion that being found and accepted inspired in her and let go, and Mr Potter was assuring Mr Evans that the Potters will shoulder every expense that Holly should incur as to her living with the Evanses as well as her schooling with Hogwarts. It felt a little like actually being given away for sums of money in exchange, which Holly knew wasn’t exactly the case. Mr Potter was simply giving her the space she wanted to get to know her mother’s family, but it made her uncomfortable anyway so she tuned them out.

Petunia was looking at her with a different sort of interest now that the news was out that she came from a family of evident wealth and respect and Holly tried not to feel like a piece of meat being oggled for display.

“How come Mr Potter doesn’t want to take you?” Petunia asked once their business at Gringotts was concluded, as Mr Evans had exchanged some pound sterling for galleons and Mr Potter had given Holly an allowance and a key to the Potter vault, and they parted ways with Mr Potter to look for where Mrs Evans and Lily had gone.

“Petunia, that’s a rude question to ask,” Mr Evans chastised her. “Mr Potter gave Holly a choice as to where she wanted to stay and she chose to stay with us. I thought you wanted that?”

Petunia looked at Holly, a little shame-faced, before she nodded. “Sorry, Holly.”

Holly shook her head and was saved from having to reply when Professor McGonagall, Mrs Evans and Lily emerged from Flourish and Blotts carrying an astounding number of shopping bags filled with books and Mrs Evans happily explained that an expense account had been setup for the Evanses to be able to settle the cost of the school supplies separately. Lily declared that they’d already gone shopping for Holly’s required books too, which Holly accepted with a small chagrined smile. She _really_ didn’t want to have to go through first year again, but perhaps Mr Potter was right and this time, she could just focus on the enjoyment and wonder of learning, instead of having to fight for her life because Voldemort was after her.

Professor McGonagall was going to leave them to let the children get fitted with robes and wands and there were goodbyes all around.

“Oh, Ms Potter,” Professor McGonagall said before she left, “in all the excitement about your appearance, I’ve been remiss to give you this.”

She handed Holly a familiar envelope, which she ripped open quickly. Inside was her second Hogwarts Acceptance Letter, and she smiled, a little nostalgic of a time when she’d been hunkered miserably in a shack on an island, taken away by the Dursleys to try to keep Holly from getting her letters, and a gentle half-giant showed up on the doorstep and gave Holly her letter and her very first birthday cake.

“Mr Potter has fire-called the Headmaster your name for the Book of Admittance as soon as your business at Gringotts was concluded,” said McGonagall. “I shall be happy to welcome you to Hogwarts come September.”

Robe-fitting was an anti-climactic conclusion to the departure of the adult wizards and Holly fidgeted and turned every which way when Madam Malkin’s shop assistant fitted her with her own robes. Petunia sat and watched them as Holly and Lily had their measurements taken, wrinkling her nose a little at the styling of the school robes.

“It just looks so… plain!” she complained when they got their purchases and the family moved out of Madam Malkin’s to go to Ollivander’s next. “It must be such a travesty to be forced to wear such boring clothes day in and day out.”

“Not the most practical either,” Holly muttered, remembering how she and Ron had always preferred not to wear their robes when they could. “Gets in the way of running and walking around miles of grounds on campus.”

Lily looked at her oddly and even Petunia, who still hadn’t gotten over how boring the Hogwarts school robes looked like compared to the other robes she’d seen hung and displayed in Madam Malkin’s shop had to stop and stare for a moment, before she smiled at Holly and nodded. Holly didn’t quite get what that smile meant, so she shrugged, although she didn’t follow them into Ollivander’s, since she had no intention of replacing her holly wand, which had served her so well after all of this time, and chose instead to dawdle outside of Eeylops Owl Emporium.

If there was something that Holly missed from her own timeline viscerally, it had to be Hedwig. Ron and Hermione were wonderful friends and Holly sorely wished she could have them with her in this adventure of getting to know her real family in this time and space, but Hedwig had been Holly’s first friend, her first confidant, her first present even, when Hagrid bought her for Holly as a birthday gift for her first (and real) eleventh year. She didn’t think she could quite find a friend that would replace Hedwig, but she sorely wanted a new familiar that she would be able to talk to unfiltered and unedited. She’d found herself working harder and harder to have to hold back from revealing far too much to the Evanses, and now, with Mr Potter’s warning about meddling with time, it became all the more imperative that she did not interfere too much with Lily’s life, lest she not end up marrying James and Holly could face something as horrible as an unbirth.

That worry had perhaps been why she’d found herself a bit more drawn to Petunia, although it may have also had to do with her unfamiliarity with Lily. She’d lived with Aunt Petunia all her life and found she could deal with the unpleasantness of it all far easier than she could deal with the unpredictability that she faced with Lily. There was also likely the fact that Petunia, being older, was a little easier for Holly to relate to than eleven-year-old Lily, although now that Fleamont had told her to enjoy her childhood, she expected that would have to change. After all, once she got to Hogwarts, she would be surrounded by eleven year old kids all over again and in far greater numbers.

She was about to go in when two kids who had evidently been racing each other bowled her over from the back and sent her sprawling to the ground.

“Oh, sorry!” the taller one of the boys exclaimed as he stopped and bent to help Holly up, checking that he hadn’t injured her and helping dust her knees as she stood.

Holly looked up at the two boys. They were both tall and obviously handsome children, with aristocratic high foreheads, lustrous black hair, straight nose and identical pert mouths. They were obviously brothers, they even wore identical sets of robes of the poshest black linen, though Holly had to wonder how they were not sweating buckets in the sweltering summer heat in London wearing such heavy looking robes.

“Now you’ve done it, Sirius!” the shorter boy said, looking around a little fearfully, probably in search of their parents. “If Mother sees you—“

“Relax, Reg, she’s fine, look, no harm done,” the taller boy said as Holly dusted her palms on her clothes and he turned to her, smiling with the most charming, wicked smile Holly had ever seen on a child. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

Holly shook her head, staring for a moment as a wave of deja vu hit her and she remembered the smell of leather, smoke and a bit of firewhisky, and realized that she was probably looking at the Black brothers, Sirius and Regulus. As children and with only a year apart in age, Sirius and Regulus looked remarkably alike, both clearly aristocratic and noble in their bearing, though there seemed to be an almost restless, boundless energy that filled the young Sirius Black to the brim, seeming almost to seep out of his skin, whereas Regulus had a cautious, wary look about him that was almost disconcerting to see on a ten-year-old.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Are you also going inside?”

Sirius nodded and he grabbed his brother by the wrist and prodded Holly to go in with them. “Come on, Mother is buying me a new owl for when I go to Hogwarts in September,” he told Holly conversationally, not waiting to check if their mother was anywhere close to following them into the shop as he dragged his brother around, peering at the owls in their cages.

Regulus stared at Holly warily, seeming to take in that she was not dressed in wizarding robes and Holly realized that the Black brothers would have still been indoctrinated in their family’s loathsome beliefs. She wondered if either boy would spout the same arrogant words to her that she’d heard from Draco Malfoy back when she’d also first met the boy in Madam Malkin’s.

Sirius was still prattling about the perfect owl to get, but Regulus had pulled his wrist from his brother’s grasp and was staring at Holly with a strange expression in his icy blue eyes.

“You dress funny,” he told her and Holly scowled.

“No, I don’t. I’m wearing clothes, same as you are.”

Sirius sniggered when he heard their exchange. “She got you there, Reg.” He seemed to size her up, realizing perhaps that she might also be an incoming Hogwarts first year and he held out his hand to her. “I’m Sirius Black, and this is my little brother, Regulus. Are you going to Hogwarts soon too?” Regulus protested loudly that he wasn’t little, but Sirius shushed him irritably.

Holly shook the proffered hand firmly. “Holly Potter. My… sister and I will be going to Hogwarts too.” She held up the letter McGonagall had given her and Sirius grinned.

“Cool. You said you and your sister… are you twins?”

“Err, no. I’m… adopted, I guess is the right word.”

Regulus’ eyes widened at the word. “You mean you don’t have any parents?”

Sirius shushed him heartily. “Reg, that’s rude to ask. Andi’ll smack you if you start asking these questions of other people.”

“What? She said she’s adopted, so it must mean she doesn’t have parents and the parents she’s with now aren’t her own!”

“That’s still rude!” Sirius cried and promptly turned away from his brother to regard Holly keenly. “Reg is right though, you dress differently, like those kids I see playing outside our house. Mum won’t let me play with them though. She says we can’t associate with muggles.” He made a face. “Bunch of claptrap, if you ask me. Are you a Pureblood? Because if you are, then that’d be boring and—”

“Of course she is!” Regulus sniped back, his voice snooty. “Her name is Potter and they’re Purebloods—“

“No one cares if they’re Purebloods or not, Reg,” Sirius replied and the argument had the tone of something the brothers had constantly fought about.

“Mum’ll have your hide if she hears you!” Regulus hissed, pinching his brother’s wrist but Sirius paid him no mind.

“I’m not muggleborn,” Holly finally said, taking pity on the bickering brothers. “Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them, though.”

“I didn’t say there was,” Regulus said, sullen. “But we’re not allowed to talk to them.”

“Pish-posh,” said Sirius, completely uncaring. “What Mother doesn’t know—“

“Sirius!” The screeching sound of the voice that echoed through the owl shop could only belong to Mrs Black and Regulus nearly jumped out of his skin. Even Sirius froze for a moment, looking as if he’d been caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. Mrs Black bustled into the shop, grabbing both boys by the wrist in an iron grip and staring down imposingly at Holly.

She was nothing like the Walburga Black that Holly remembered of the screaming portrait in Grimmauld Place. This Walburga Black was years younger, her face, much like those of her sons, aristocratic-looking and almost impossibly symmetrical. Her hair was pulled back in a tight black bun held together by a funny-looking fascinator hat with a stuffed vulture that reminded Holly of Neville’s grandmother. She was dressed in elegant dark green robes, and the pearls that hung on her neck shone with an ivory gleam. Her lips, the same full ones as Sirius’, curled disdainfully when she saw who her sons had been talking to.

“Another one of those… riff raff, I see,” she sniffed. “What is Diagon Alley coming to that we must—“ she cut herself off and swept her two boys away, towards the shop exit, as if it was utterly beneath her to even be conversing with someone like Holly and started chastising Sirius loudly for talking to people who were “not the right sort” and even getting Regulus into his supposedly ill-mannered behavior. Sirius didn’t pay attention to her and he glanced back at Holly as he was pulled away, waving half-heartedly at Holly before he disappeared out of the shop completely.

Holly waved back, but Sirius was already gone, and the shop assistant at Eeylops was smiling at her obsequiously, inquiring if she’d decided on an owl. She bought one in the end, a pretty, brown tawny owl she nicknamed “Wally” because the owl warbled like the Walburga Black of Holly’s memories did, and she left the shop to find the Evanses, who were standing outside Ollivander’s looking a little lost.

“There you are, Holly!” Mrs Evans exclaimed and she bustled to Holly’s side, giving her shoulders a chastising little shake before she hugged her. “Please don’t disappear like that again, dear. Mike and I thought something might have happened to you.”

Holly shook her head, though she supposed Walburga Black happening to anyone must be considered quite an ordeal. Mrs Black hadn’t looked half a crazed as her aged portrait in Grimmauld Place, but she was just as loud and just as full of vitriol.

“I bought us an owl so Lily and I can write to you and Petunia all year,” she said, and Lily cooed happily at the owl when Holly told her the owl’s name was Wally. Even Petunia looked a little less sour to see that her new friend and her sister were making every effort not to make her feel excluded from their trio, as the five of them slowly made their way out of Diagon Alley, and prepared to go home.

* * *

The rest of the summer seemed to pass Holly by in an idyllic haze. Meeting and speaking with Fleamont Potter afforded Holly a measure of security in her existence in 1971 that she never thought she could have. A week after they’d met in Diagon Alley, Mr Potter wrote to Holly to assure her that he was setting things in motion to start the British wizarding ministry to combat the threat of an oncoming rise of a dark lord, and that Holly should not allow the events he was setting into motion to affect the life she was meant to live now.

For her part, Holly promised Mr Potter that she would try to put her past life behind her. There was no use in dwelling over whether she could return to her timeline; there was no way that she could since Time Turners evidently hadn’t even been invented yet and there was no known wizard who could manage a time reversal spell powerful enough to send Holly back to her timeline. She found, as well as she spent afternoons lounging in the Evans’ back yard, sipping cold tea, or walking the edge of the woods with Lily to pick flowers, that she no longer wished to return to her own time. She missed her friends very dearly, and she worried something might have happened to them in her disappearance, but as she thought more and more about her predicament, she realized there was every likelihood that the life she had lived may no longer even exist as Time had essentially rewinded and the changes in the playback, her presence in the past, could mean there would be no fast forward to achieving the same future from whence she came.

Oddly, she found herself comfortable in that knowledge. If there was some way the catastrophe that was the First Wizarding War could be averted, then the Second War would never have happened and if Holly would have to experience an unbirth… or rebirth… then she’d take it as it came and it wouldn’t matter to her either way, as she would have paved for a time that everyone could have a happy and peaceful life without the shadow of war looming in the horizon.

Lastly, she took to heart Mr Potter’s advice for her to enjoy this second chance at a childhood. At this point, there really was no sense in trying to force a confrontation with Voldemort, or even hunting down his Horcruxes. In the first place, Holly didn’t even know where the Horcruxes she and Dumbledore had found would be, if they’d even be in the same locations they’d looked in during her timeline. Secondly, Mr Potter intended to nip the Pureblood supremacist rhetoric that Voldemort was trying to push in the Wizengamot early, before he even rose to power. He assured her that he was in correspondence with Albus Dumbledore on the matter, and Holly was convinced Dumbledore would know what to do, how to prevent the war that had claimed so many lives and ruined countless others.

She put thoughts of war and destruction and Killing Curses away from her mind, and concentrated on enjoying the little remaining time that she had with Lily and Petunia. Holly had never had siblings, though the closeness she shared with Ron and Hermione could perhaps rival that of siblings. Still, they had their own families, and Holly had the miserable one she’d been left to, and Dudley wasn’t any sort of brother that Holly wanted to have.

Lily, by contrast, was a wonderful mix of kind-hearted, spirited and curious. She reminded Holly a fair bit about Ron, except where Lily was a responsible child, hunkering down in the last week of summer hols to have a quick read through of the course material that Hogwarts would cover for their first year. She read some of the passages of the introductory books to Potions, Transfiguration and Charms to Holly and Petunia, much to the latter’s amusement (“Lily, none of those words even make sense! That’s so silly, who would want to pickle frog eyes?”), and Holly’s exasperation, as she never wanted to read another theory book again since she was already familiar with many of the spells.

One thing that had to change though, between their trip to Diagon Alley to the time they were scheduled to go to King’s Cross to catch the Hogwarts Express, was that Mr and Mrs Evans put their foot down and advised Holly not to use any more magic, since she received her acceptance letter. McGonagall had evidently warned Mrs Evans that there were penalties for repeated use of underage magic outside of Hogwarts, and though Holly wanted to protest that her wand had no Trace because really, she wasn’t underage at all, she refrained from doing so and acquiesced to the Evanses’ wishes. She didn’t want to ruin what good relationship she’d already forged with her mother’s family by being pig-headed.

Snape had been like a dark cloud hanging over the summer, though. Holly didn’t want to interfere with Lily’s obvious deep friendship with the greasy boy, and Holly had Petunia to entertain anyway since Petunia found Snape just as distasteful as Holly did. She consoled herself internally that James and the Marauders would eventually settle whatever silent grudge she had against Snape for killing Dumbledore in her own timeline, but she was uncomfortable with the idea that she may have to turn a blind eye on the way they bullied Snape.

On the last day of summer holiday, Lily decided she wanted to bring all her friends together. Holly thought it was a last-ditch effort to get Petunia to get along with Snape, and though she didn’t want to have to spend any more time with Snape, she said nothing as the four of them walked from Spinner’s End to the ice cream parlor in town.

Snape complained incessantly and rather underhandedly about the heat and the dust and the fact that the local ice cream parlor only served two flavors compared to the myriad of flavors that would have been available had they gone to Fortescue’s in Diagon Alley instead.

“You’d think he’d be thankful someone was buying him ice cream at all,” Petunia griped as she and Holly waited patiently at the counter while Snape and Lily made themselves comfortable under the large plastic sunshades that the ice cream parlor had setup just outside the little store. “It’s not like anyone even wants him here.”

Holly shrugged and tried not to be too annoyed herself. Snape’s complaints were grating and what made it all the worse was that Lily seemed to be utterly oblivious to them. Probably because he constantly directed his complaints at Petunia and Holly, as if they were responsible for the fact that Cokeworth was hot and dusty and miserable and had one tiny ice cream parlor that only ever served chocolate and vanilla sundaes. Holly tried not to take it against him because if she did, she might try to strangle him when Lily wasn’t looking.

“I can’t stand that she just sits there and thinks he’s not trying to… to… I don’t know, monopolize her attention!”

“He’s a bit of a wet blanket,” she conceded, because if she said nothing, Petunia was just going to go on and on and none of them would enjoy their afternoon.

“He’s a bit of a creep is what he is,” Petunia told her as the shop attendant handed them a tray of four ice cream sundaes. Petunia dug into her pocket because Mr Evans gave pocket money so they could go out that afternoon, while Holly took the tray and followed Petunia out. Lily dragged plastic chairs from the empty table next to theirs and Holly distributed the single scoop vanilla sundaes. Snape eyed his distastefully, but said nothing about it when Petunia’s glare dared him to complain about boring vanilla ice cream drizzled with slightly burnt caramel syrup.

She ate in silence, watching the empty sun-baked road and listened to the idle chatter between Snape and Lily as they speculated about what Hogwarts was supposed to look like, Petunia alternately smiling when she thought Lily said something funny and hiding her sneers with the plastic teaspoon of ice cream whenever she found something Snape said annoying.

“Have you read ahead on our subjects?” Lily asked Snape. “Holly won’t read with me; she says it’s boring stuff, but I _know_ she’s been able to do some of the spells already that I found in our Charms text.”

“Like that floating spell,” Petunia supplied. “Holly made Lily’s bed float from my room back into Lily’s room.”

Snape’s lips curled. “Ah, the levitation spell, yes. Mum taught it to me for cleaning up at home when I was five.”

Holly wanted sneer back and ask if he already knew that, then he must be terrible at it since their living room looked like a pig sty, but Petunia got there first.

“Is that why there’s beer mugs on every surface in your house whenever we’re over?” Petunia asked pointedly.

Snape flushed but said nothing and fumed in silence. Lily frowned at her sister but Petunia blithely continued eating her sundae as if there was nothing at all that was wrong with the world.

“What about potions?” Lily asked, not quite giving up on the conversation though there had been several seconds of silence already between the four of them. “Didn’t you say your mum used to love brewing potions? Do you think you could find some of her old notebooks from when she went to Hogwarts? It’d be ever so useful if she had any pointers for how we’re going to study something none of us know.”

Snape shook his head. “No, Mum never got a chance to preserve any of her things from Hogwarts. A pity if you ask me. It would have been far more interesting to study brewing a Draught of Peace than reading up on civics and doing sums.”

“Which you were terrible at as I recall,” Petunia sniped. She turned to Holly with a glint in her eye like she had the biggest scoop of gossip to share. “Mr Summer taught Maths in the local primary school and Snape’s needed remedial lessons from when they started learning how to do long-form division in Year 3.”

Holly remembered being in Year 3 and having trouble with long-form division herself, though she’d never been half as terrible as Dudley, who didn’t know what a divisor and a dividend were and mixed them up constantly when dealing with word problems. She wondered if Snape’s troubles with Maths, and likely the sciences too, had a lot to do with his leanings toward magic. Magic didn’t need a wizard to know Maths, since the wizarding economy was already enchanted to handle all the complex numbers on its own for wizards, and obviously, wizards had no need for the sciences since magic allowed wizards to bend and break the physical rules that governed many of the hard sciences that most kids learned in primary school. It wouldn’t be surprising in the least if Snape simply didn’t care to learn such muggle things, especially if he was raised in a household where there was an adult witch to supervise his education in magic. What did surprise her though was the fact that Snape even went to primary school.

“Maths is hard,” Holly conceded, “but it isn’t impossible to learn.”

“Only muggles need maths,” Snape sniffed disdainfully.

Petunia opened her mouth to retort, likely another potshot at what she must consider to be Snape’s innate stupidity if he couldn’t grasp simple mathematical concepts like sums and long-form division, but Holly felt there was something else there that the boy needed to learn.

“Really? You don’t think you need maths? How are you intending to understand Arithmancy, then?” She raised one dark brow expectantly but Snape didn’t seem to get what she was driving at. “Don’t you have to do sums with the number correspondences of your name or things like that? What about measurements for potion ingredients? Don’t the measurements use fractions and basic sums too? Or if someone enchanted your galleons and wizards cheat you out of your money?”

“You can’t enchant galleons like that!” Snape said, his voice rising with his agitation. “There are permanent charms—“

Holly sneered at him. “Thought about that, have you? Well, what if I told you it _is_ possible to enchant wizard money? I know someone—a couple of someones—who used Protean Charms on galleons. And if _they_ could enchant galleons to change the dates on the coin, who’s to say some enterprising bloke couldn’t cast some spell on your money so it can’t count itself? You’d have to learn how to count out your sickles and knuts on your own then, and use multiplication if you wanted to convert between your coins.”

“Maybe that’s why his mum can’t afford to get him his own clothes and makes him wear her blouses,” Petunia laughed derisively. “Wizards cheated her out of her money.”

Snape jumped to his feet, his black eyes livid with rage, his hands clenched tightly into fists so hard that he’d snapped the thick handle of the plastic spoon for his sundae clean off. “Take that back!”

“Tuney, that wasn’t very nice to say,” Lily said, a little tremulously, realizing the sudden tension between her sister and her friend.

“Why not?” Petunia demanded. “It’s the truth! He’s eleven years old and look at him walking around town wearing a… a smock, like he was a little girl!”

“They’re robes!” Snape cried, throwing down the handle of the spoon onto his empty sundae bowl. It dinged quietly and bounced harmlessly onto the tray, spilling the melted dregs of his ice cream all over the table.

“Poor greasy little Sevvie wearing a dress,” Petunia taunted in a singsong voice.

It was perhaps testament to Holly’s skills as a Seeker that she even saw the way Snape’s eyes cut hatefully from Petunia’s smug, grinning face to the jagged end of the plastic handle of the spoon on the table. Suddenly, it floated up, slowly at first and then hurtled at careening speeds towards Petunia’s face. Holly didn’t have to think as she shoved Petunia off her chair, her hand darting out into the air to catch the spoon handle before it hit anyone, but she’d miscalculated the catch, more used as she was in catching round flying objects like the Snitch and not sharp objects that seemed intended to maim an innocent, if unpleasant, little girl. She caught the sharp end of the plastic in her palm and the projectile embedded itself deep into her hand.

Blood bloomed before the pain even registered. Lily screamed. Petunia was on the floor, crying. She’d hit her leg on the pavement and skinned her knee. Snape stood unmoving, his eyes flashing with hate.

“Are you out of your mind?!” Holly yelled, completely unmindful of the wound in her hand. “You could have blinded her!”

“So what? She’s only a muggle!”

“She’s a person, you arse,” Holly hissed, “and I would have said the same of you, but clearly you’re not. You’re a monster!”

Just then, the shop attendant stepped out of the store, likely alerted by their loud voices. “Is everything all right out here, children?” His eyes widened when he saw Petunia on the floor crying, Lily bent over her sister with tears in her eyes, and Holly standing across from Snape, her hand bleeding profusely, the handle of the spoon still embedded into her palm. “Oh my god! Don’t move, girl, I’m going to get the first aid kit!”

Holly paid the shop attendant no mind as she stared down at Snape. “You going to try to maim him too? He’s a muggle too.”

Snape opened his mouth but no words came out. He stared at Holly for another beat, his face brimming with hate, and then looked down at Lily who was trying to calm her bawling sister, before shoving away from the table, turning tail and running away.

Mr Evans came to pick the girls up a half hour later, arriving just in time to find Holly sitting in a corner. The spoon had been gingerly picked out of her wound by the shop attendant, but he only had Band-Aids, so her hand was still a mess. Petunia was still crying softly, her skinned knee cleaned up and bandaged by the shop attendant as well, and Lily stood slightly away from them, her face red with shame.

The shop attendant didn’t let any of the girls speak as he quickly explained that an accident had occurred, resulting in Holly’s injury, and that Petunia had likely slipped off her chair or tripped somehow. Holly didn’t bother to correct him, too tired to think about anything but her own hatred of Snape. He was an unpleasant little creep at any age and she couldn’t understand why Lily wanted to be friends with him. It wasn’t that Petunia herself wasn’t a bit of a shrew, but he didn’t have to attack her like that.

They had to take a taxi back home even though the ice cream parlor was less than five blocks from the Evans’ house, because Petunia had difficulty walking, thanks to her skinned knee.

That night, Lily didn’t drag her mattress to Petunia’s bedroom, and Holly didn’t want to be caught in a feud between the sisters, so she took her camp bed out in the den and fell asleep watching the staticky screen of the little black and white TV airing reruns of Doctor Who, and dreaming about hopping across time inside the TARDIS so she could prevent Dumbledore’s death by snatching the wand out of Snape’s hand. In her dreams, she hadn’t been trapped under her Invisibility Cloak, unable to move because of the Body-bind Curse Dumbledore had thrown at her, and she’d been able to help the Headmaster get to safety.

When she woke in the small hours before dawn, her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, her hand throbbed even though Mrs Evans had cleaned and redressed her wound before she’d gone to bed, and she wanted nothing more than for the previous day to have never happened at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not know about you, but I love Petunia being such a mean girl here. I feel like this is the most in-character I've gotten her. This is meant to be a stand-in for the scene in _The Prince's Tale_ in Deathly Hallows, where Snape's accidental magic felled a tree branch that hit Petunia. I've got that, and another scene from the same chapter in DH in the next one, when we introduce James Potter.
> 
> The conversation on wizards being bad at Maths is something I've had with my sister. I don't even think I meant for it to make sense, so don't look too closely on Holly's arguments. XD


	8. Return to the Castle

The next morning, Mrs Evans had taken the day off so she could go with Mr Evans to take her girls to King’s Cross. She’d woken early so she could check Lily’s and Holly’s trunks and ensure they’d packed all of their robes and books and quills and rolls of blank parchment (they only had a few, because parchment was costly and Mr Evans bought Lily and Holly ruled notebooks and biros to take their notes; parchment would only be for turning in their homework), and found that the doors to both Petunia’s and Lily’s rooms were closed, Holly’s camp bed was rolled neatly and tucked against the old loveseat Mr Evans’ mum had gifted the little family, and Holly was downstairs in the kitchen making herself tea and talking to Wally.

Holly missed Hedwig like a soldier missed an amputated limb and Wally, while a friendly enough owl who cooed quietly whenever Holly gave her a bit of owl biscuit treat as they sat together in the kitchen, wasn’t a real substitute. She couldn’t help but feel that she and Wally were worlds apart, where Hedwig had been with her through the trials and tribulations of six years of schooling and living with the Dursleys.

“Good morning, Holly dear,” Mrs Evans greeted somewhat sleepily. She was already dressed to go even though it was very early, and started taking things out of the pantry to cook breakfast. “You’re up early. Is your hand giving you any problem?”

Holly looked down at the thick bandage on her hand. The wound she’d gotten from the broken off handle of the plastic spoon hadn’t been very deep and Mrs Evans had cleaned it again thoroughly the night before rebandaging it. Muggle first aid wasn’t too bad but Holly itched to take her wand and try to heal the cut. Knowing Mrs Evans didn’t want her to use magic outside of Hogwarts though, she’d refrained from doing so and now the wound made her hand ache as she handled her mug of tea.

“I’m fine, Mrs Evans,” she said quietly, coaxing Wally back into her cage and moving her away from the kitchen counter so Mrs Evans could get started slicing the sausages. Holly was reminded of how Mrs Weasley had moved around her kitchen in the Burrow, magic all around, doing the cooking and cleaning for her. Mrs Evans was a muggle though, so things had to be done by hand, a little more slowly, though no less lovingly. Holly liked that even though there were no spatulas rolling the bacon on the skillet on its own, the Evanses’ kitchen was small and clean and always smelled like home.

“Can I help you with the cooking?”

“Oh but your hand, dear—“

“It’s no bother,” Holly told her as she washed her hands and then took the eggs to whisk and season with salt and chive. “I used to do this all the time when I was… when I was in Surrey.”

Mrs Evans looked up from where she was frying the sausages and the bacon. “I’m sure you and your aunt bonded over the cooking.”

“Er, not really,” Holly said as she popped bread into the toaster. “It was just part of my job at home.”

“It’s nice to know that you’re growing up into a responsible young woman,” said Mrs Evans. “Petunia usually helps out with the washing after, and Lily likes to clean up the pantry on weekends, but with all the excitement yesterday, Mike and I thought we should give you girls some time to have a lie in. I can see that hasn’t helped you, though. Did you sleep in the den?”

“Petunia and Lily were fighting,” she admitted rather uncomfortably. She didn’t know how much the girls’ parents knew of the friction between Lily and Petunia about Lily’s magic, and how Lily’s friendship with Snape just exacerbated the resentment brewing between the sisters. She remembered Aunt Petunia had harped on and on about how their parents would always fawn and coo over Lily’s magic and she didn’t really want to encourage it. It seemed to have just estranged Petunia from her family and made her hate Lily all the more, and Holly didn’t want to be in the middle of that.

Mrs Evans sighed as she plated the food and took the whisked eggs to whip them with a little milk, just like how Aunt Petunia had taught Holly to do when she was six, before she poured them into the skillet to fry. “Petunia has been a bit difficult since we discovered that the strange things Lily could do is magic. We try not to play favorites between our girls, but sometimes it’s just hard not to take notice of everything that Lily does. They’re just so… strange and wonderful. I think it’s made Petunia feel a little left out.”

That was an understatement, Holly thought but refrained from saying so.

“Mike and I try to encourage her to develop her own talents and interests,” Mrs Evans continued over the sound of the eggs sizzling a little, “but she doesn’t seem to want to try to develop interests of her own. She’s never really been as outgoing as Lily and making friends in her secondary school now hasn’t been easy for her, especially when she’s just here, home for the summer with only Lily for company.”

“Well, she’s very good at drawing,” Holly ventured, remembering the little drawing of herself and Sirius that Petunia had gifted her on her birthday. “And I know Petunia loves fashion. She sits and reads her glossy magazines every night before she goes to bed.”

“I know,” said Mrs Evans with another small sigh. “But with the expenses that come from Lily’s schooling, it’s been a little tight to buy art supplies and new magazines for Tuney. She tries not to complain really, but I can see she wasn’t very happy when we got home from Diagon Alley.” She shook her head as she took the eggs out of the heat. “I’m sorry dear, I shouldn’t be troubling you with these things. You’re still a little girl, like my Lily and Petunia, and you shouldn’t have to worry about keeping the peace between them when they’re sisters and really should know better than to fight each other when they aren’t going to be seeing each other for months when you and Lily go off to Hogwarts today.”

Holly thought it was sad that the Evanses couldn’t strike a better balance between their daughters because of money, and was more than a little relieved that Mr Potter was not only paying for everything that she needed for Hogwarts, but also sending her a stipend through Mr Evans so she didn’t put them out so much from their monthly budgets. She didn’t want this rift between the sisters to grow, but knew it would if Petunia kept getting the short end of the stick because Lily’s school requirements were so pricey. Things like quills and parchment that had once seemed so disposable to Holly felt like precious commodity suddenly because of how measured the Evanses had been when buying Lily’s school supplies, and she was forcibly reminded of the Weasleys. She wondered if there was something she could do about them even while she was away in school with Lily, and resolved to find out if there were things like owl order art supplies that she could get for Petunia. She could probably even talk to Lily about it and they could use her allowance from Mr Potter to get things that would help Petunia’s interests in art blossom.

When the others woke up and came down for breakfast, Lily spent the entire morning as they were getting ready to go to King’s Cross apologizing to Petunia. She would have spent the same time groveling before Holly too but Holly told her it wasn’t a problem, though her hand twinged every so often to remind her that actually, it was _not_ fine, but she wasn’t going to hold a grudge against the little girl who was going to become her mother when Snape was the one who mucked everything up.

Before long, the five of them were standing in front of the house again while Holly stuck her wand hand out to call in the Knight Bus. As they boarded, Mr Evans heaving a little as Jeffrey Shunpike helped him with Lily’s and Holly’s trunks, Holly turned to look at the little home she’d spent the last month that she’d been in 1971. The Evanses’ house was nothing to look at at all, but it had been warm and loving and Holly hadn’t quite imagined that she would have been made to feel so welcome even if they didn’t know she was Lily’s daughter from the future. She turned and paid her galleons to Jeffrey Shunpike and boarded the bus, sitting next to Lily, who was still despondent because Petunia wouldn’t talk to her at all.

* * *

Getting to Platform 9 3/4 wasn’t an issue with Holly with the Evanses, and they arrived early enough that the platform wasn’t very crowded, though Mr Evans was skeptical when Holly told her that they could simply push the cart through the barrier until she actually did so herself. They followed quickly and soon, Mr and Mrs Evans were fussing over Lily and Holly, just like countless other parents fussed over their children going off to Hogwarts for the start of the school year.

Lily stared at the majestically gleaming red and black train that was the Hogwarts Express. Petunia had eventually, rather grudgingly, forgiven her at Mr Evans’ coaxing and the two of them were good friends again as they both admired and gawked at what seemed to be the outlandishly styled clothing of the wizards and witches milling about on the platform. Some of the children, especially the younger ones who had parents very much excited and nostalgic to see their first years off, were already in the black school robes, but there were others, especially the older kids, and the parents, who wore jewel-colored robes of different, fancy looking material. Petunia stared after those with undisguised interest, especially when she spotted a trio of witches standing in the middle of the platform while those around them stared in open admiration of them.

They were very beautiful, the oldest, a black-haired woman with massive wild curls, stood stiffly, holding her wand as she ushered the two younger ones, a brown-haired girl who looked exactly like the first one, and a smaller girl with very fair skin and downy blond hair. The oldest witch didn’t look like she was still a student, but the two younger ones were evidently in Slytherin, as the brown-haired girl wore an expensive-looking green sash around the cinched waist of her tan silk robes, and the blond girl had a Slytherin prefect badge pinned to the lapel of her school robe, worn over a fashionable cream-colored dress that made her look very chic.

“They’re beautiful,” Petunia said, as she gawked and admired the dresses the three witches wore longingly.

Holly recognized them, of course, though she didn’t know how she managed to. Bellatrix Black was easily the most striking and most recognizable of the three Black sisters. She was beautiful and ethereal in a way Andromeda and Narcissa could never hope to be, much like Sirius had been when Holly first saw the eleven-year-old version of him in Diagon Alley. She had the same smooth high forehead as Sirius, the same straight, thin, aristocratic nose. Her dark, heavy-lidded eyes gave her face an allure that had been lost after the years she’d spent in Azkaban from Holly’s timeline, but made her look sloe-eyed and seductive now that she was a fresh-faced teenager fresh out of Hogwarts. The small curl of disdain in her full lips told Holly she despised being tasked to see her sisters off, but the mar on her pretty face did little to detract from how beautiful and shapely and striking she was.

Andromeda looked very much like her, though her eyes appeared softer around the edges and her mouth didn’t seem like it lent to sneering the way Bellatrix’s did. Her robes were fashionable and Holly could see the glint of delicate jewelry dripping from her neck and wrists.

Narcissa, the youngest, seemed pale and washed out next to her darkly beautiful sisters, but she was no less striking. Her face was smooth still, not yet looking like she’d spent half her life smelling dung under her nose as Holly remembered her the few times she’d ran into her and Draco in Diagon Alley in her own timeline, and she flitted about talking and gossiping with a group of other fifth year Slytherins.

“They’re the Black sisters,” she found herself telling Petunia. “The wizarding community treat their family like they’re royalty. Don’t be fooled, though. I’ve met two of them before, and they’re not exactly the welcoming sort, especially for people who don’t have magic.”

“The blond one looks like Grace Kelly,” Petunia said, her voice filled with longing. “I wish I could make clothes as beautiful as what she’s wearing.”

Holly blinked for a moment, thinking back to her conversation early that morning with Mrs Evans and suddenly realized she had an idea on how to both encourage Petunia’s skills in art and fashion, as well as bridge the growing gap between her and Lily.

She started to tell Petunia about some of the robes they’d seen in Madam Malkin’s. She didn’t know much about fashion or materials used in clothing, but she did know which ones worked for maximum maneuverability and comfort, having seen how some of these robes looked like in her own timeline when they were worn by people far more fashionable than her (Tonks came to mind because she was pretty and cool, but Holly also remembered how Cho had looked like when she was in her casual day robes and she’d been pretty hot), when Lily’s voice interrupted their conversation.

“I’m not talking to you!”

Snape had shown up and was trying to engage Lily to board the train with him and find a compartment together, but Lily, having just spent the morning groveling for Petunia’s forgiveness, grudgingly given though it was, just wasn’t interested in engaging with him, at least not where her sister could see.

“She was the one who taunted me,” Snape insisted, cutting a scathing look in Petunia’s direction. “If she hadn’t provoked me, none of that would have happened yesterday.”

“Oh so you _did_ intend to hit me?” Petunia demanded snottily, evidently having overheard the conversation as well.

“No one asked you anything, muggle,” Snape said, turning back to Lily. “You don’t belong here. You don’t belong anywhere that we are.”

Lily’s eyes flashed. “Are you saying there’s no place for my sister?”

Snape cut a panicked look at Lily’s affront and tried to backtrack. “I mean she shouldn’t be here; this platform is only for wizards and witches, and she’s a muggle. You remember how she even tried writing to Headmaster Dumbledore, begging to be admitted to Hogwarts too!”

Petunia stared at Lily in wide-eyed horror. “You read that? How can you read my mail? That’s private!”

Holly’s head swiveled as she turned from Snape to Petunia, not quite understanding what was going on. Petunia wrote to Dumbledore to ask to be admitted to Hogwarts too? When? And why would she—

“—I don’t want to go that school of yours,” Petunia said loudly, tugging her hand away when Lily desperately tried to grasp her for commiseration. “I suspect the two of you need to go to a special school because you’re both weirdos, you and Snape. They must have that school to keep you away from normal people like us—“

“Stop,” Holly said softly, grabbing Petunia by the arm, forcefully enough that she suddenly fell silent. “You don’t really believe that, Petunia, so just stop. There’s nothing wrong with being magical, just as there’s nothing wrong with being a muggle.”

“Yes, there is; muggles are useless,” Snape muttered, and Petunia opened her mouth to retort but Holly gripped her arm painfully and she subsided, hate brimming like tears in her eyes.

“Fuck off, Snape,” Holly hissed, putting herself between the sisters and drawing her wand menacingly. “I’ve had to listen to you be an arse and put muggles down all summer and I’m at the end of my rope. You say one more thing about muggles, and I assure you, you’ll find yourself plastered to the underside of the Hogwarts Express, wishing you weren’t going to this special magic school because magic’s going to kill you on the way there.”

“Holly, you said a bad word!” Lily gasped, utterly scandalized, and Holly rolled her eyes. If Lily couldn’t understand why the foul language was apt for a monster like Snape, Holly didn’t know how she could help her.

“Get lost, before I make you,” Holly snapped, shoving Snape away with the tip of her wand. He glared at her, his dark eyes dripping with undisguised loathing, before he drew himself up and slunk away. Holly exhaled loudly and picked up her trunk from the cart.

Petunia squirmed as she tried to pull away from Holly’s grip and Holly blinked and released her. She hadn’t realized she was still holding on, nor that she was holding on so tightly. Petunia’s arm had a ring of red imprinted by Holly’s fingers.

“Do you mean that?” she asked quietly as Mr Evans, who hadn’t paid attention to his kids at all and had been chatting with Mrs Evans and another group of muggle parents nearby, helped Lily with her trunk. “Can magic kill?”

Holly thought about the flash of green from the Killing Curse, so close to her face as it exploded on Aunt Petunia. She thought about Cedric and the screams she heard when Dementors were close by. Then she thought of the sordid details of crime in London in the evening news.

“Anything can kill. Magic isn’t special in that regard.”

“Your eyes went funny there for a little bit,” Petunia said. “Like… did something—“

“My eyes are fine,” Holly cut her off.

Petunia nodded and turned to her sister as Holly and Lily walked up to the nearest entrance into the train. She seemed to be chewing on something she wanted to say but she remained silent so Holly didn’t push it. Lily, though, threw her arms around her sister and hugged her tightly.

“I’ll write you everyday, Tuney,” she declared, her voice going watery as she realized she’d be separated from the girl who’d been there with her from the time she was born. “I’ll even ask Headmaster Dumbledore for you! You never know, maybe I can convince him—“

Petunia shook her head. “No. I don’t want you to. I don’t need your magic to be special like you.”

“But you _are_ special, Tuney!” Lily cried. “You’re special because you’re my big sister, and no one else can claim that and big sisters are the best sisters! They said that in _Seventeen_ magazine! We read it together!”

Petunia’s eyes flicked towards Holly, who’d turned aside, a little uncomfortable with the show of emotion between the sisters, before she hugged Lily back.

“I know,” she said, her tone lofty. “That’s why I don’t need to go to your magic school.”

Lily sniffled and blubbered a little more before letting Petunia go so she could hug her parents. Mr and Mrs Evans kissed her on the cheek and the forehead, and they even gave Holly a little hug to say goodbye.

“Take care of yourselves, girls,” said Mrs Evans, all weepy from having to part with her youngest daughter. “Listen to your teachers and stay out of trouble.”

Lily waved enthusiastically to her mum and dad and to her older sister before taking her trunk by the handle and following Holly to step into the train. They were going off to Hogwarts finally and Holly felt utterly endeared as Lily followed her around until they found an empty compartment together, alone at last, and the silence between them was utterly content and amiable and Holly found herself actually looking forward to spending idyllic days in school. She loved the Evanses, but to be surrounded, once again by the thrill and excitement of discovering magic in the first flush, out in the first real home that she’d ever known, was something she would always look forward to.

* * *

Although Petunia had been annoyed with Lily up until Mr Evans made her apologize, she was still concerned enough for her sister that Lily might get bored during the long train ride that she packed a few of her older magazines with Lily’s things, and Lily brought out the _Seventeen_ magazine where she’d read that older sisters were the best sisters, showing the article to Holly and talking brightly about all the things that Petunia had taught her from the different magazines they’d read together. She showed Holly pages upon pages of late sixties fashion, extolling the virtues of sheath dresses (Holly had no idea what they were until Lily pointed them out with an exclamation that when she was older, she was _so_ going to wear one) and wondering if there were spells to make her hair curly, like Holly’s, who thought she must have been mad if she wanted the wild bird’s nest that Holly had to wrestle into submission daily.

They were so engrossed in their conversation that they hadn’t paid attention when their compartment was invaded by a few other first years who evidently didn’t know where else to go since older students chased them out of compartments to be with their friends. Lily talked about Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes and Blue Peter, where they’d interviewed Anne Frank’s father. Lily was obsessed with learning about Anne Frank after her primary school class had read an abridged version of _The Diary of a Young Girl_ , even though the book had never been popular in Britain, and Holly found herself hanging on to the whimsical, childlike wonder and horror that Lily described herself feeling when her class had read the book.

They didn’t take notice of the anyone who came and went into their compartment, until the door opened and Snape slunk in, his greedy eyes falling on Lily, whom he joined quickly. Lily put her magazines away with a quick shake of her head to Holly who guessed that must mean Snape wasn’t very interested in them, likely because they were muggle publications and Snape was an arsehole and a bigot, but they managed to keep the peace with small talk that Holly tuned out of, preferring to stare outside as the countryside sped by.

Holly would have really preferred if Lily just didn’t talk to Snape at all, considering that she’d promised Petunia she wouldn’t, but she wasn’t going to keep Lily from deciding which friends she wanted to keep. She didn’t like Snape, but that didn’t mean she could impose on what she wanted or didn’t want on Lily, the same way Ron hadn’t expected her not to be friends with Hermione when Ron found her annoying and brown-nosing during their first year. Of course, Hermione was a bit of a nerd and a killjoy, and she was insufferable half the time, but she wasn’t a hate-mongering little bigot, so there really wasn’t much of a comparison.

She wondered instead how much of the landscape of England and Scotland had changed over the two decades between her mother’s first train ride on the Hogwarts Express, to the last time Holly herself boarded the train to return to Privet Drive. Very little, she surmised, if the greenery was any indication.

Snape and Lily started talking about what they thought Hogwarts would be like, and Holly only half-listened since she already knew, and although she was curious as to what the differences would be between now and her timeline, she didn’t want to engage in conversation about it, lest she give herself away.

*Her attention was drawn though, when Snape said to Lily, “You’d better be in Slytherin.”

“What’s Slytherin?”

It seemed it wasn’t only her attention that was piqued, because one of the boys that Holly had completely ignored up until that moment, looked up from where he was going through the Chocolate Frog cards he had on his lap. He was a slight boy, with a shock of unruly black hair, tan skin and he wore round spectacles that glinted a little in the bright daylight. He had changed out of whatever regular clothes he wore and was in his school robes already, which were pressed and pristine and obviously new, especially when compared to the limp, flat fabric of Snape’s own school robes. Holly didn’t have to search her memory if she knew this boy because his face was almost exactly like hers, except for the squarer shape of his jawline, and the dark brown eyes. This was her father as a child, James Potter.

“Who’d wanna be in Slytherin? I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?” He directed the question to another boy who was slouched lazily on the seat opposite, next to Holly. The boy stirred from his half-slouch and ran a hand casually through his lustrous hair.

_Sirius,_ she thought, and the boy looked up at her at the same time that she looked at him, recognition flashing through his eyes for a moment before he turned to James.

“My whole family is in Slytherin,” he said, his pretty face unsmiling, before he shrugged and grinned first to James, then a bit more charmingly, at Holly and Lily. “Doesn’t matter though, I intend to break tradition, if only so I don’t have to share the same common room as Narcissa.” He nodded to James. “Where are you wanting to be anyway, if you’ve the choice?”

“Gryffindor,” James said without further prompting, and puffing up his chest. “Like my dad.”

Snape curled his lip but said nothing. James noticed though and he cocked an eyebrow in challenge.

“Got a problem with that?”

“I suppose if you want to be in the house that prized brawn before brains—“

Sirius gave a sharp condescending laugh that reminded Holly uncomfortably of Malfoy back when she’d first met him in Madam Malkin’s before her own first year. “Where’re you hoping to go then, seeing as you’re neither?”

James roared with laughter and even Holly couldn’t suppress a giggle. Sirius winked at her, but Lily stood up, flushed and affronted for her friend.

“Come on, Severus. Let’s find another compartment.” She grabbed Snape’s wrist and turned to Holly. “Are you coming?”

Holly waved lazily at her, not wanting to spend a minute longer in Snape’s company and James and Sirius mimicked Lily’s words, shouting a merry, “Bye, Snivellus!” as Snape and Lily disappeared and banged the compartment door closed. The two boys, flushed with hilarity, settled back into their seats, turning to Holly with interest.*

“And what about you? Where were you planning to go?”

Holly shrugged. She already knew. “Gryffindor.” She looked James in the eye, and wished she could will him to recognize her, will him to _know_. “Like my dad.”

“Good girl,” Sirius said approvingly.

“What’s your name?” James asked.

“Holly. Holly Potter.”

James’ eyes lit up. “Hey, I remember you! Dad said he was going to meet you when we went to Diagon Alley to get my school things. So, are we related?”

Sirius snorted. “‘Are you related?’ You look like cheek halves of the same arse, down to the glasses. How does anyone not think you two might be twins?”

“We’re cousins, actually,” she said a little breathlessly, remembering what Mr Potter had instructed her.

“Don’t knock the glasses, mate,” James said. “I’d be blind without it, wouldn’t you, Holly?” He grinned at her, offering his hand. “James Potter, at your service, cousin dearest.”

Holly took his hand and wondered why she felt like she was floating but at the same time thinking how much her dad and Sirius reminded her of Malfoy at eleven. Sirius gave her a rakish smile when she relinquished James’ hand and offered his own.

“Sirius Black,” he said. “But then you already knew that.” Holly was surprised Sirius even remembered their encounter in Diagon Alley and smiled back.

“Blimey, no wonder you said your entire family’s in Slytherin,” James commented. “Everyone knows about you.”

“You mean everyone knows we’re crazy and inbred?” Sirius joked, his smile going a little crooked.

Holly let out a delighted laugh, shaking Sirius’ hand enthusiastically. She couldn’t believe she could have this now, sitting here in this compartment, sharing a joke with the child versions of her father and godfather as James handed out Chocolate Frogs and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, and she found herself sitting back and enjoying the two boys’ spirited conversation about the cards they got from their Chocolate Frogs, and challenging each other with the grosser flavors of the candy beans. If she’d been looking forward to Hogwarts before with Lily, she was sure, she couldn’t wait to spend the year with her dad and Sirius now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not my best writing. I lifted entire lines from _The Prince's Tale_ in Deathly Hallows, for James' and Sirius' introduction, and I'm not happy with that, but I didn't think I could change such an iconic scene, so. Everything between the two asterisks (*) were lifted and adapted from Deathly Hallows, with really only the narrations changed so it was from Holly's perspective. The part about Petunia writing to Dumbledore also comes from DH, and I thought it'd be good to bring that in to illustrate how much Petunia actually longs to be like Lily.
> 
> Anyway, y'all can egg my house now. The next two chapters aren't my best writing either, but I promise it'll get better! I just didn't want to rewrite these parts anymore, considering I spent so much time writing and restructuring them so they weren't half as shitty as they started their life as. D:


	9. A Legendary Friendship

Holly already knew what was going to happen at Sorting, though she was surprised when the Sorting Hat tried to argue with her into putting her in Slytherin again. She’d all but yelled aloud that she would actually set the Hat on fire if it ever put her in Slytherin. She didn’t want to be anywhere near Snape. When she joined the Gryffindor table, it was to raucous applause as she was quickly followed by James, who barely had the Hat touch his head before it was yelling Gryffindor.

Over dinner was when she was introduced to the other younger versions of many of the people she’d met in the Order, and some she’d only seen in photographs because they’d died in the first war. Mary McDonald was the sole other muggleborn in first year besides Lily, and Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes were the two Quidditch-mad other first years that rounded out their group. Holly listened to both of them talk late into the night even though her eyes were heavy with the excitement of the day as they gushed about the Quidditch Teams they favored, a conversation they’d started during the Feast with James, who apparently had stuffed a Quidditch almanac between his ears. Holly didn’t know much about professional teams but she’d gotten into a spirited discussion about their chances for joining the Gryffindor team with Dorcas, who played Beater, and James, who played Chaser. Sirius joined them, though his interest was rather more sedate, as if he found the other kids’ interest in Quidditch beneath him.

“What position do you play?” James asked just as the treacle tart appeared and Holly hoarded a lion’s share on her plate.

“Seeker.”

“Then we’re almost a full team!” James grinned. “McKinnon and I will be Chasers, Black, you can be Beater with Meadowes, Holly’s our Seeker. Now we only need another Chaser, and a Keeper!” He turned suddenly to a boy who sat a little aways from Holly’s right. “You! Lupin, right? Do you play?”

Holly looked the young Remus Lupin over. He didn’t have a lot of scars on his face yet, but there was a slash on his nose that was still red, and his skin looked a little clammy and pale, and Holly belatedly remembered that it had been the full moon barely two days before term started. Remus must still be recovering. She hadn’t seen him in the train or in the boats and wondered if his parents brought him over early to sample the grim accommodations of the Shrieking Shack.

“No,” he said quietly. He was a tall, thin boy, skinnier than James and Holly, who were a slight pair, and his face had a delicate, fine-boned quality to it that was accentuated by how painfully thin he was, and he picked only at the tenderest portions of meat and soaked his bread and potatoes in the leek soup.

Sirius watched him, his lip curled slightly. “Looks like a good wind could blow him down, Potter. Not a good candidate.”

“Hey,” said another boy with a pudgy face and messy blond hair. “What’s with your scar?”

Holly turned and found herself face to face with Peter Pettigrew, and her eyes widened, as she’d completely forgotten he even existed. Somehow, she was sure she needed to keep James and Sirius and Remus away from him. He was a rat and he was going to betray them all. But then… hadn’t she given the child Snape here the benefit of the doubt, and Snape had killed Dumbledore in her timeline? What if this Peter was just another boy who apparently had no tact to speak of?

Remus shrugged and pushed his plate away. “I had an unpleasant altercation with an angry Kneazle kitten.”

James and Sirius laughed uproariously, but Peter blinked and apparently didn’t get the joke and he turned to Holly.

“You have a funny scar too,” he told her.

Holly’s hand flew up automatically to her scar. It hadn’t hurt ever since she’d fallen into this timeline and she’d all but forgotten about it. She fingered it now to the curious eyes of her classmates.

“I got it when I was a baby,” she said. “A dark wizard killed my parents and tried to kill me too.”

Peter looked utterly poleaxed by the sudden grim turn of the conversation. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“What happened to the dark wizard?” Mary asked curiously.

“Dunno,” she shrugged. “Probably still out there, hungry for my blood.”

Lily put her hand on Holly’s arm comfortingly, even though Holly didn’t feel any kind of way about it anymore. She was a long way away from Voldemort, this was a time where there hadn’t even been a prophecy, and she had her parents now and even though they were no more older than she was, sitting beside her on the Gryffindor table, it was more than she could have asked for.

“It’s whatever,” she muttered, and over Peter’s head, Remus flashed her a small grateful smile, as if he was so very thankful that she took the focus away from him.

“Well, I, for one, am glad that this dark wizard didn’t manage to off you,” James said loudly to dispel the sudden pall over their dinner. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a Seeker for my dream team.”

Holly laughed and across the table, Sirius shot her a look that seemed to say “Can you believe this bloke?” but conversation resumed and steered away from scars and dark wizards, and by the time the evening ended, Holly was in the same bed she’d taken in the six years she’d gone to Hogwarts in her timeline, her belly was full with hearty, good food, and her mind full of wonderful conversation with her mum and her dad and her godfather.

“Are you going to sleep?” Lily asked her as she put out a notebook and her biro. “I’m going to write to mum and dad.”

Holly remembered telling herself that she was going to look for a way to help encourage Petunia’s interests, but she figured she might at least need a copy of the Daily Prophet to look for a few ads for owl order art supplies, so she changed out of her robes and into pyjamas instead. She was about to drift off to sleep when Dorcas asked the same question Sirius had asked her in Diagon Alley.

“Hey, if the two of you are sisters, how come you have different last names? And how come you have the same name as James?”

Holly didn’t know if it was the right time to educate an eleven-year-old about things like divorce, but supposed it wouldn’t matter since that wasn’t the case with her and Lily anyway.

“My parents are fostering Holly,” Lily explained. “We found her in the woods and she was hurt and her aunt was dead so we took her home.”

“An everyday Snow White,” Mary giggled. Dorcas and Marlene, coming from exclusively wizarding families didn’t get the joke, but Holly and Lily laughed along.

“James and I are cousins,” Holly said, not really liking that she had to perpetuate a lie, but not really having any choice in the matter. It wasn’t like she could tell these kids that James was her dad and Lily her mum. They’d think she was nuts, and Lily might try to kill James on sight; she’d been so put off by him after their encounter in the train.

“So how come his family didn’t take you in instead?” Marlene asked. “That’s usually a thing with Purebloods, in case you didn’t know. They never let the children in their family go to anyone else for fear of other people with blood less pure than theirs polluting their young with their beliefs.”

“James’ family isn’t like that,” Holly snapped, irrationally angry at the insinuation that the Potters, _her_ family, would even be the slightest bit aversive to non-Purebloods. Her father _died_ in a war to stop a megalomaniac from foisting his blood supremacist rhetoric on the wider magical population.

“Chill, Holly,” Dorcas said. “I don’t think the Potters are like that either. I’m sure Marlene didn’t mean anything by that. _I_ ’m surprised Sirius Black is in Gryffindor. Isn’t it his family the one that wants to refuse Muggleborns from being allowed to go to Hogwarts? He even has cousins in Slytherin now.”

“Sirius isn’t like that either,” Holly said, though a lot less defensively.

“Sirius Black? Holly, didn’t you say your godfather’s name was Sirius Black?” Lily asked. “Are you related to him too?”

Holly froze and realized she’d dug herself a shallow grave in talking about the Sirius from her timeline and even mentioning his name when there was every likelihood they would meet Sirius in school.

“I wouldn’t be surprised, especially if you and James are cousins,” Marlene said. “All the Purebloods are pretty much related to each other these days anyway. There’s only so many of them left around and if they all want to keep their magic to themselves, then they’ve only got each other to marry and have kids with, innit?”

“What are Purebloods?” Mary asked, curious.

“The people who have both their parents come from magical families,” said Dorcas. “And not like Marlene or I. I mean those old families that have had magic for generations and generations. My nan is a muggle, so the stuffy old families won’t consider someone like me Pureblood.”

“What’s so important about it anyway?” Lily wondered. “I mean… don’t we all have magic and that’s why we’re all here?”

Dorcas shrugged. “Some people like to feel important?”

“They’re all convinced that if you’ve got old old magic blood in you, then that makes your magic more powerful or pure,” Marlene said, sounding utterly revolted. “It’s all a bunch of hogwash, if you ask me. I mean, I may not be as pretty as Black since he’s got his looks bred into him for generations and generations, but I got magic all the same, innit.”

Mary guffawed at the description. “That makes it sound like he’s some type of show dog!”

“Sounds about right,” Marlene smirked.

Holly turned away from them when she was satisfied that they weren’t going to slander James’ and Sirius’ good name anymore. She agreed with a lot of what Marlene said, but Marlene didn’t know James, and she obviously didn’t know Sirius like Holly did. Sirius was a _good_ person. Back in fifth year, Holly had felt that he’d been the only person who loved her unconditionally, surrounded as she’d been by all the people who’d branded her a liar when she was only telling the truth.

She turned to Lily but Lily had gone back to her letter writing, so she let her continue. At least she didn’t ask about Sirius, Holly’s godfather, again. She didn’t think it was something that would be very easy to explain, and she could only hope that Lily wouldn’t think to mention it when Sirius was in earshot or things would start to get messy. Holly didn’t know how she was going to explain to eleven-year-olds the future that she’d seen. None of them were even alive in her timeline.

She listened instead to Dorcas and Marlene talk about their favored Quidditch teams and let their childish voices lull her to a deep and dreamless sleep.

* * *

Holly woke the next morning feeling refreshed. The Gryffindor girls of 1971 were very different from the girls Holly first met when she was a first year in 1991. Hermione, she already knew from the train, and she remembered being utterly annoyed by the girl whom she would later come to consider as her sister and best friend. She’d been so annoying in the first few weeks at school because she was so obsessive with studying. And then the other girls, Lavender, Parvati and Kellah, were mostly more interested in boys and nearly anything else. It was good to hear conversation centered around Quidditch instead, since Holly always felt like the odd girl out for being so Quidditch obsessed during the years she went to school in her timeline.

Lily woke earlier than her and had already made a trip to the Owlery to send Wally with her letters home, but she waited for Holly and Mary for the two of them to get dressed and ready before they all went to breakfast. Marlene was still snoring, and Dorcas mumbled in her sleep about some popular Chaser from Tutshill Tornados, so they let them be since it was still early.

Surprisingly, the Gryffindor boys of their year were already at the table. Remus hunched over by himself looking like he was going to fall asleep in his porridge and Peter was trying to look nonchalant while he listened avidly to the excited whispers going on between James and Sirius. Evidently, the two boys had not wasted any time in becoming close and start planning their pranks together. Holly wondered how long it took before the four boys became the infamous Marauders. Neither Remus nor Sirius talked much of the time they weren’t friends with James, so Holly didn’t really know when the legendary friendship between the four boys actually began.

Alice Brown, the fifth year Gryffindor prefect, and Holly later realized was most likely Neville’s future mum, sat with two friends, reading a copy of the Daily Prophet. They had what appeared to be the previous week’s edition of Witch Weekly between them and Holly stopped by to ask if it was all right for her to borrow it when they were done. Alice smiled and handed it off to her, telling the three younger girls that they could just leave it in the common room later. It was a copy that she brought along for everyone in Gryffindor to share.

“What’s in Witch Weekly?” Mary asked as the three of them started on their breakfast.

Holly shrugged. She’d never really been interested in the magazine before, but she knew Lavender and Parvati swore by it when talking about trends and hair styles fashionable in wizarding Britain.

“It’s a fashion and gossip magazine for witches,” she said and turned to Lily. “I thought Petunia might be interested in getting a subscription and look through some of the robe fashions. It might help her feel a little more connected to you if she could see what’s fashionable among witches.”

Lily brightened. “That’s great! Tuney loves all the dress features in those old Vogue copies we found from Mum’s trunk from when she was in uni, but all the magazines at home are very old. It’d be nice if she had something that was updated and connected to magic, so she doesn’t always feel so left out.”

They leafed through the pages while they ate, pointing out this and that robe that might be something Petunia could draw, and Lily talked animatedly of the times when Petunia whipped out her old school notebooks and drew fancy dresses that Petunia dreamed to someday make. Marlene and Dorcas joined them after a while, and they had even more suggestions for publications related to women’s interests, like Spella Weekly, which Marlene was sure she could request a copy of from her older sister, who was a Hufflepuff seventh year.

Holly wrote in her subscriptions, to be sent out for Wally later, when the morning’s post owls flew in. There were letters for Mary and Dorcas (Marlene’s sister dropped her letter off later), and all of the boys in their year. James tapped her shoulder and handed her a note that evidently came from his dad, which Holly tucked among her books for reading later, when she was alone. Everyone seemed delighted with their post, except Sirius, who’d stopped talking and laughing with James, and stared at his unopened post with a pale face and a stiff, straight back.

“What’s with the face, mate?” James inquired, pulling open a box of expensive French chocolates that his mother had sent him and passed it around, beginning with Remus, who stared at the candy with wide, amber eyes, like Christmas had come early, before gingerly taking one and passing it on.

Sirius flattened his mouth and shook his head, but James had already twitched the letter away from him.

“Want me to open and read it for you?” James offered.

Sirius stared at him like he was crazy. “Why would you do that?”

James shrugged. “Because you look like the world’s about to end. I mean, how bad can a letter from home be?”

Sirius laughed but he did not sound amused. “If it comes from my father, it could spell the difference of me being allowed to continue in Hogwarts or me being allowed to live. Cissa’s probably snitched about my being in Gryffindor already.”

“Surely, your dad wouldn’t be so put out that you’re not in Slytherin with the rest of your family?”

Sirius snorted. “Want to bet on it?”

James held his gaze for a moment before he ripped the envelope open and read the letter aloud.

_Dear Sirius,_

_I am most disappointed that you have not been Sorted into Slytherin. However, rest assured that your mother shall ensure this is rectified post-haste. We will discuss your Sorting in the house of mudbloods and blood traitors when you come home._

_Orion Black_

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Remus ventured. He was still nibbling on the small piece of chocolate he’d taken from the tray James had passed around, like he was absolutely savoring it for the longest time possible. James noticed, because of course he did, and grabbed what remained in the tray, some four more pieces and dumped it all on Remus’ plate. Remus tried to protest, but James simply shrugged with a flippant, “Mum’ll send another try before the week is out, and you look like you’ll enjoy it far more than I will. I like Bertie Bott’s better.”

Sirius took the note from James and laid it out on the table next to the dregs of his demolished breakfast. “Being a disappointment to my dad is about the equivalent of being a blood traitor.”

“What’s so wrong with being in Gryffindor?” Peter asked.

Sirius huffed. “I count at least three mudbloods in our year, including Evans, McDonald and Holly—“

James suddenly shoved him. “Take that back.”

Sirius looked utterly confused. “Arse, I didn’t say anything—“

“Take it back or I’m not talking to you,” James demanded, standing a full inch taller than Sirius and trying to look menacing, even though Holly thought he mostly just looked constipated.

Sirius stared at him, still confused, so when he said nothing more, James gathered his things and walked away, leaving Sirius staring after him, utterly mystified with the sudden change in the boy with whom he’d been talking non-stop with since the night they were all Sorted.

Marlene and Dorcas exchanged glances and packed their things up and walked after James. Peter slunk away quietly, and Remus hunkered down on the opposite benching, trying to disappear, leaving Lily, Mary and Holly at the table, and Lily and Mary weren’t even paying attention to the boys’ conversation.

“He meant the M word,” Holly told Sirius, when he didn’t move from where he sat staring down at his father’s letter.

Sirius frowned. “Mudblood? Well, what else are we supposed to call you and Evans and McDonald? You’re not Purebloods.”

“Jesus Christ, stop repeating it. It’s a slur, Sirius,” Holly tried to explain as patiently as she could. Her Sirius never told her he’d once been so ignorant of the indoctrination his family shoved down his throat that he’d never known any better. “Think about what it means when you say that word.”

“But it’s just a word,” Sirius said, obviously still not getting it. “Mum and Dad and everyone else I know say it like it’s nothing.”

Holly sighed. “And how do their beliefs about people who don’t come from purely magical families make you feel? I mean think about the word itself, Sirius. If you cut your hand open, what’s the color of your blood? Do you think it’s going to be any different from the color of mine or Lily’s or Mary’s if we cut our hands up?”

Sirius stared at her uncomprehendingly for a long moment, before realization dawned in his eyes and he nodded, shame-faced. “I’m sorry, I didn’t… I didn’t really see it like that.”

Holly shook her head. “And now you know better.” She stood and gathered her things. Mary and Lily had moved on and were waiting for her at the end of the table. “Come on, you can apologize to James after Charms.”

* * *

Sirius and James were back to being friends before Charms was even over, and they’d evidently thought up their very first prank in time for Herbology, which the Gryffindors had with Slytherin. Lily wanted to work with Snape and Holly, but Holly wanted to be nowhere near the Slytherin boy, and since Marlene and Dorcas were already paired up, Holly went with Mary, but their duo ended up a trio when Sprout decided to foist Peter on them, because James and Sirius had grabbed Remus, who looked like he wanted nothing to do with the way the other two were making flying projectiles of the rolled up leaves of their stinging nettles every time someone in a green tie passed their table by.

By lunch time, all the boys in Slytherin had nettle rash burning down their necks because James thought it would be a fun idea to shoot their nettle projectiles into the Slytherins’ robes, and Remus, while he hadn’t participated, kept score on how many nettles James and Sirius got into each Slytherin. Marlene, Dorcas and Peter all thought it was funny, and Holly and Mary were indifferent because who cared about the Slytherin boys who looked at them funny and whispered disparagingly about the two of them whenever they passed. But Lily was incensed because James had apparently gotten Snape, and because Snape’s robes were so ill-fitting, the nettle leaves went all the way down in his clothes, and he had a massive rash from the middle of his arse all the way to the back of his neck.

Sprout never caught the two boys of course, because Remus, being both the score-keeper and reluctant participant, also ran interference magnificently, deflecting Sprout’s attention every time James or Sirius took a shot. Miraculously, neither boy hit anyone in Gryffindor with their projectiles, not even Lily, who constantly had her head together with Snape.

It was therefore a very ill-tempered Lily who grabbed Holly and Mary for lunch, sitting well away from the boisterously laughing Gryffindor boys as Remus tallied up their scores and James and Sirius demonstrated the levitation spell they used and how they’d modified the Latin incantation to make the levitated object into a projectile to Peter.

“I don’t know why everyone found what they did funny,” Lily said unhappily. “They could have really hurt those boys!”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Holly said. She didn’t really condone the sort of trickery the boys did, but she couldn’t help but be endeared anyway as she watched them talking and laughing about the morning’s successful prank. “The rashes are harmless and Madam Pomfrey’ll have those kids out and good as new before Transfiguration even starts.”

“But they didn’t do anything to them,” Lily protested. “Severus definitely didn’t do anything. We were just working on our own plants.”

Mary stared at Lily incredulously. “How can you think that? We three’re right next to your table and I could _hear_ Snape being a berk every time he turned to grab tools from the worktable behind us.”

“What did he say? Severus wouldn’t say anything without someone else starting things,” Lily said, defending her friend.

“Well, for starters, he told me to get out of the way because I’m a mudblood,” Mary said. “And I heard Avery and Mulciber saying the same thing. They would’ve pushed me out if Holly and Peter hadn’t been there.”

“I don’t even know what that word means!” Lily exclaimed.

Mary sighed, exasperated. “Weren’t you listening to Holly and Sirius this morning? James nearly decked Sirius over that word. It’s a bad word.”

“You mean—“ Lily lowered her tone and leaned close to Holly. “Like ‘fuck’?” She flushed, and looked around furtively, as if afraid someone was going to chastise her or take away house points because she said something naughty. “Stop laughing, Holly! I heard you say it in the train station and Mum told Tuney and me that she’d wash our mouths out with soap if we ever said bad words like that!”

Holly had to take a couple deep breaths to master herself. Lily was too adorable for words—!

“No, it’s not the same. The word I said is foul because it’s vulgar, but it’s just another English word. The word Mulciber and Avery and Snape call Mary is a slur. It’s meant to belittle her because she comes from a family where she’s the only one who’s magical, that she’s somehow unworthy or polluted because her blood isn’t purely magical.”

Lily’s eyes widened. “You mean like me?”

“Exactly like you” Holly explained, once again wondering how she was in the position that she had to explain these things to people like Sirius and Lily. Where was Ron when she needed him? “People throw the word around a lot because it makes them feel superior that they came from purely magical households. You remember what Marlene said last night.”

That seemed to stump Lily. “But Severus doesn’t come from a purely magical household. His dad doesn’t have magic.”

“Then he’s a hypocrite,” Mary said, spearing her roast pork viciously with her fork, as if she was stabbing it into the hand of one of the boys who’d thrown the slur at her.

“I don’t think he means it,” Lily countered, ever loyal to Snape. “I mean… if the word applied to him too, then why would he say that?”

Mary shrugged, not wanting to have to spend any more time thinking about any of the Slytherins, who to her got their just desserts. Holly thought about going into a lengthier explanation about half-bloods and Snape’s hypocrisy but decided she didn’t want to get into another fight about Snape again. If Mary, who was on the receiving end of the slur, didn’t want to fight with Lily over it, Holly wasn’t sure she wanted to do that either. It had only been a day since Lily and Petunia nearly had her caught between them and she didn’t want to feel like that again anytime soon. She wished she’d heard Snape or Avery or Mulciber because she would’ve given them a piece of her mind and something more vicious that stinging nettle rash, but decided now wasn’t the time to start fights with Slytherins when she was supposed to be keeping her head down. She’d bide her time instead. Those little junior Death Eaters would get their time of day, and Holly would be there to see it put to paid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here is the second sub-par chapter. I think I don't like this chapter because it's made of three small scenes as opposed to one long-ass scene? I feel like I'm more a fan of the long take than snappy vignettes like this. It isn't half as terrible as the previous one, or the next one, but I don't like it very much, which is sorta sad, because this is the chapter that has like everyone getting to know each other and becoming friends. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever, anyway. Thank you to everyone who still continue reading even when I feel like the chapters I've written aren't as good! You're all stars and my ego desperately needs your existence lol
> 
> Also idk whether you noticed, but my description of Remus' September full moon is out of whack. The 1971 September full moon was on Sept 5, and Holly's narration says it's two days before they went to Hogwarts. I probably should have changed how that scene went but again ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ it just be like that sometimes in my fic.
> 
> <3


	10. Mistakes

The first week of classes flew by rather uneventfully. It was evening, after all of their classes for the day had ended and Holly was in the Gryffindor common room, by the fire, penning a letter to Petunia about the magazines she’d owl-ordered so Petunia could see what wizarding fashion was like and maybe get some ideas to make the clothes either more functional or look less like shapeless sacks of cloth, like she’d done in the drawing she made for Holly.

Lily and Mary sat close by, discussing the day’s lessons with undisguised excitement and Holly was fondly reminded of Hermione, so bright-eyed and eager to learn, as she listened to their childish banter about Transfiguration, where Lily was, surprisingly, not particularly very good at, considering she’d been brilliant at Charms and Herbology, and absolutely stellar at Potions.

She had the array of matchsticks she’d tried to Transfigure into needles laid out in front of Mary and they were all still either invariably made of wood or were not particularly pointy. Holly hadn’t done too badly for herself, but McGonagall had heaped praise on James and Sirius in the class because their matches were not only Transfigured properly into the correct shape and form of needles, James even managed to charm a bit of string he found in his pocket to thread his needle (what he was doing with that string, Holly didn’t want to know) and Sirius’ shrunk his to be the same size as the embroidery needles his cousins used, then proceeded to duplicate them and made them fight tiny needle-sized sword fights.

The two girls were discussing the merits of even having to work on transforming matchsticks into needles (“Why do I even need to Transfigure a matchstick into a needle?” Mary asked. “I could just go to the store and _buy_ needles; I’d even get them in a set of different sizes like the ones Sirius did!” Lily giggled at that, saying, “But then Sirius made his for free, whereas you’d need to pay for your needles!”) in preparation for writing the homework McGonagall had assigned.

Holly wasn’t fussed about homework; she figured she could probably half-ass something about the theory and uses of the spell just fine to fill up two feet of parchment and figured Mary had the right idea about asking McGonagall why anyone would even need to Transfigure their matchsticks into needles, when it was readily available in a store for thirty-five pence. She supposed, if one was _truly_ in a pinch, like if your trousers were ripped down the crotch and you didn’t really want to go out and buy something with which you needed to fix them, and you had some matchsticks handy… or if you didn’t have thirty-five pence and you were _absolutely_ consumed with the need to do a spot of embroidery, which Holly thought was a massive waste of time…

Alice came up just then, laden with books and looking utterly harried. Holly felt for her. She was in fifth year and OWLs preparation was brutal even on the first week of classes.

“Hey Holly, Lily, Mary. How did your first week of classes go?”

“It’s so much fun!” Lily enthused, cutting away from Mary’s rather impassioned reasoning that buying needles was so much more convenient than having to Transfigure ones and not even getting the size and shape right. “We’ve got lots of homework and such, but everything is so different and the theory is just as exciting as putting everything into practice.”

Alice gave a little laugh. “Well, I’m glad _some_ one’s enjoying their first lessons. The professors have all got us up the wall with so much homework to start our preparation for OWLs, I’m not even sure when we’re supposed to have time to study.”

“A friend of mine told me all the OWLs homework _is_ half the studying,” Holly said, remembering Hermione fondly.

“Not if you have to write—“ Alice checked the small scrap of parchment she had piled over her books as a checklist “—three feet of parchment in Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Arithmancy and Herbology. And that’s _just_ for the first day. I’ve got papers for Potions, Ancient Runes, Astronomy and Transfiguration too! I’m not sure I’m cut out to juggle OWLs and being a Prefect _and_ Quidditch all in the same year.”

“You’re on the team?” James interjected, having overheard the conversation since he, Sirius, Remus and Peter were sitting nearby playing Exploding Snap.

Alice, whose face was nowhere near as pretty as Holly remembered Lavender Brown had been, looked pretty cute when she smiled at James’ enthusiasm. Her cheeks dimpled. “Yeah, I’m Chaser, and the Captain beginning this year. So if you’re harboring Quidditch dreams next year, you better be sure you’re in my good books, Potter.”

“Yes, ma’am!” James exclaimed, pumping a fist excitedly in the air.

“Oh, Holly, I almost forgot, but Professor Dumbledore asked if you could see him in his office after dinner.” She fished for a note tucked into her Charms book. “Here, this should get you into his office in a pinch.”

James, who had been turning away to get back to his game with the other boys, doubled back to stare at Holly admiringly. “Detention with the Headmaster on the first day, cousin. I never thought you had it in you.”

Alice laughed. “Nothing like that, Potter. I think it has to do with her aunt. The muggle authorities were investigating her death last month and it seems the Ministry’s gotten involved.”

“Holly wasn’t the one throwing stinging nettles at Slytherins, in any case,” Peter chortled, remembering the looks on the Slytherin boys’ faces as they all but an up to the Hospital Wing after Herbology class on their first day.

Sirius slapped his arm irritably. “You aren’t supposed to say that in front of a prefect!”

“But they were being mean to Mary!” Peter protested.

Alice gave another laugh. Holly thought she really was rather cute, not as pretty as Lavender, or even Cho, who had been one of the prettiest girls Holly had ever seen in Hogwarts, but she had a certain charm about her that was easy to see in the way her thin lips were quick to smile, her round cheeks flushed, and her eyes shone brightly when she did.

“Can’t hide that now, Black, Potter,” she said, still smiling. “I’ve got my eye on you two, so don’t push me to take points on your first week here.”

She waved to the group of first years and went to join her own friends in another corner of the common room. Holly stared after her admiringly.

“She’s so cool,” said Holly, rolling up her note to Petunia absently as she watched Alice spread out her books and take a licorice wand from a tall, moon-faced boy with dark hair.

“Isn’t she,” James agreed. “I’m gonna be the next Quidditch captain after her. I heard Longbottom was also in the running to be made captain this year, but I can already tell he’s gonna be Head Boy by the time we’re in fourth year. He won’t have time for Quidditch.”

Sirius made a face. “Who’d want to be Head Boy when they can play Quidditch _and_ pranks on the Slytherins?”

James laughed and made finger guns. Lily, who’d been watching the exchange, rolled her eyes and went back to her and Mary’s homework.

“Hey Holly, Alice mentioned something about your aunt being investigated by muggles and the Ministry,” Remus, who’d been quiet and determined to disappear up until then, spoke up. “What happened?”

Holly flushed, not liking that six pairs of young eyes were all suddenly turned on her, and Lily smiled a little and took pity on her.

“My sister and I found Holly in the woods near our house,” she explained. “She’d been hurt and she was with her aunt and her aunt was dead. My parents took her to live with us while the policemen are trying to find her family.”

Mary gasped. “That’s awful, Holly! What happened? Did she get a heat stroke while you were out? My mum said this summer’s been terribly hot and we shouldn’t be out in the sun without bringing huge water bottles around so we don’t get a heat stroke.”

“The Ministry wouldn’t get involved if she’d died from a heat stroke,” Sirius said. “Your aunt’s muggle, isn’t she?”

Holly nodded, shifting uncomfortably. “Erm. She was hit with a Killing Curse.”

James, Sirius, Remus and Peter all had eyes as wide as saucers and the four of them abandoned their set of couches to move closer to the girls.

“What happened?” Remus asked, a note of morbid curiosity in his voice.

“Did you see who did it?” Sirius demanded.

“Did they hurt you?” James said, anxiously looking Holly over.

“How did you know it was the Killing Curse?” Peter wondered.

Holly hemmed and hawed, thinking about how much she was going to reveal now that she’d let slip that Aunt Petunia had been killed with a spell and not some other mundane manner, but Lily was already talking and Holly stared at her in horror at the words that tumbled out of her mouth.

“Didn’t you tell Tuney that the lady who hurt your aunt was called Bella—umm, Bella something, I’m sure! Bellawin? Bellachix? Bellafix?”

Sirius scowled darkly. “Bellatrix. She’s my cousin.”

“Right!” Lily said. “Bellatrix, and she’s related to—“

“No one!” Holly cried loudly, her brain finally engaging. For a moment there, while they’d discussed her sudden appearance and Aunt Petunia’s death, she’d felt like she was so utterly disconnected from reality and she could only watch in horrified fascination as the conversation unfolded beyond her control. “She’s related to no one, and her name isn’t Bellatrix. You must’ve misheard, Lily.”

Sirius stared at her for a long moment before shaking his head. “Well, if it was Bellatrix, I wouldn’t be surprised. My cousin is crazy and she hates muggles. She wrote a treatise about using muggles for spell practice for her Charms Mastery application.”

“That’s awful,” Remus said looking like he couldn’t quite imagine anyone wanting to experiment on muggles. _They’re people too!_ His eyes seemed to say.

Sirius snorted. “My family is awful, there isn’t really any other way to describe them. They carry on and on about how we’re so very special because we’re the Blacks and we’re practically magical royalty with how pure and magical and special our blood must be, and then don’t even have the basic decency to recognize that muggles aren’t all that different from us—I mean, they look and talk exactly like us so I don’t see what the fuss is about!” He looked utterly revolted, before smoothing out his face and turning to Holly. “If it’s my cousin that hurt you and your aunt, I hope the Ministry catches her and puts her in Azkaban.”

“Sirius, you can’t say that about your family!” Lily exclaimed. “Holly told me about Azkaban and it sounds like a terrible place!”

“And that’s exactly what Bellatrix deserves when she keeps magicking all of Mum’s cursed heirlooms to appear in our muggle neighbors’ yards whenever she’s over at our house,” Sirius replied, rather belligerently. “You might not think so, Evans, probably because you’ve lived with your happy family who love you and everyone else all your life, but there are people out there who are just _born_ bad, and my family’s it. They all deserve Azkaban.”

“Does that mean you should be in Azkaban too?” Peter asked uncertainly.

Holly saw red. How _dare_ the rat suggest that Sirius should be in Azkaban? He’d already spent twelve years in that hellish prison and he hadn’t done anything to deserve it! If anything, it should have been Peter Pettigrew, who’d betrayed her parents and murdered those muggles— “Are you an idiot? Of course not! Sirius is just a kid! He didn’t even do _any_ thing!”

“Hey, hey,” James put a hand on Holly’s shoulder, subtly trying to get her to back down as she’d jumped to her feet and was all ready to have her fists swinging at Peter. “Pete didn’t mean anything about it. No one should be in Azkaban, not even your cousin, Sirius. She’s probably not even the one who attacked Holly’s aunt, and if Holly says she’s not the one, then she isn’t; she’s the one who was there and saw whatever happened, not you. So there’s no point talking about putting people who haven’t done anything wrong into Azkaban. The Ministry will sort it out, right, Holly?”

Holly let the warm hand on her shoulder fizzle the anger that was singing in her blood at the memory of her Sirius, gaunt and half-demented with grief and rage, screaming about murdering Peter, who was a rat and a traitor, letting the image fade from her mind’s eye, so she could see what was physically in front of her now—James and Sirius and Lily, all perfectly alive and well—and huffed, unclenching her fists, and nodding. “Yeah. I suppose.”

“We should go to dinner now,” Remus said after a beat, putting away his homework calmly. “I’m famished.”

Everyone agreed and they all trooped from the common room to the Great Hall, talking animatedly about the classes they’d had on the first week. All of them, that is, except Sirius, who lagged behind, and stared after Holly’s back, with a thoughtful expression on his face.

* * *

Holly went alone to Dumbledore’s office after dinner. Sirius was still looking at her strangely over the entire meal, and Lily watched her with puzzled eyes. Even James looked a little concerned, but then officially, he was supposed to be her cousin, so perhaps the concern was warranted. She knew she was going to get asked questions after the meeting with Dumbledore, and she was a little worried of what she might let slip. She hadn’t been so careful about keeping any details about the future from whence she came and it seemed to be causing so much confusion with the people of this time, because of course they were just kids and they were curious and concerned for their friend, especially since there was so much terror and mystery surrounding Holly’s entire appearance in this time.

She wondered, on the way to Dumbledore’s office, what the headmaster would say. Fleamont assured her, in a note he sent separately from the letter he sent through James, that he’d kept the headmaster updated of what he knew of Holly’s appearance and that she came from some grim version of the future that would be in everyone’s best interests to prevent.

“Ice Mice,” she told the gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office.

The gargoyle grinned toothily at her before it swiveled aside. “Thought we’d never see you here again!”

Holly thought that was weird, since she wasn’t even supposed to be alive at this time and she’d obviously not been to the Headmaster’s office since school started in this timeline, but thought nothing more about it. Dumbledore’s office in 1971 didn’t differ greatly from how it looked in 1991. Holly glanced curiously at the array of magical instruments on Dumbledore’s massive desk, remembering a little shamefacedly how she’d smashed all of them up back in fifth year, over her grief at Sirius’ death. Dumbledore looked up from the roll of parchment he’d been reading and smiled at her now, making her flush a bit, remembering how patient and kindly her old mentor had been when Holly had broken down once she’d screamed and cried herself hoarse.

“Good evening, sir. Alice said you wanted to see me about the Ministry investigating the death of my aunt?”

Dumbledore nodded and gestured for her to take a seat. “Yes, good evening, Ms Potter. Ms Brown is quite right, though it’s not so much a discussion, but that the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement has advised me that they have taken over the investigation from the muggle authorities. Correspondence should be sent to you through the school, since you do not have a legal magical guardian, until Mr Potter declares you in front of the Wizengamot when that august body goes into session, and the DMLE unfortunately does not correspond about active Auror investigations with the muggle authorities, including your legal muggle guardians.”

“Oh,” Holly said. She hadn’t quite expected that but she supposed it might be better that Mr and Mrs Evans weren’t updated that Aunt Petunia had been killed using the Killing Curse. It might create hysteria over whether or not Holly would be next, when she was fairly sure the Bellatrix here didn’t even know she existed in this time.

“I think we can allow the DMLE to manage that without expecting anything to run amiss,” Dumbledore said with a twinkle in his eye, and Holly found herself smiling a little uncertainly and hoping that the Ministry didn’t actually find anything because there would be nothing to be found. “I called you, in fact, because I received a rather alarming letter over the summer from Fleamont Potter, about a curious case of a young woman who traveled back in time as a result of the Killing Curse clashing with her accidental magic.”

Holly flushed at the rather succinct portrayal of how she’d ended up where she was. “Er, yes sir. I guess you could say it like that. I mean the way it happened.”

“Most curious,” said Dumbledore mildly. “Mr Potter told me you had a terrible warning for us in our time, about how our actions, or non-action, contributed to the grim life that you led from the time from whence you came.”

Holly clasped her hands and sat up from her seat. “Voldemort, sir. We have to do something about him now! I—I haven’t seen much of what he’s like in this time; I don’t even know… you never told me when we were studying him to understand how we could stop him what he was doing before the first war started.”

Dumbledore looked at her somberly. “I understand your position, Ms Potter. I suspect the future may not have been quite the bright future we wanted for our young graduates of Hogwarts. I do not doubt that there may be war looming in the horizon, what with the rhetoric we hear in the Wizengamot these days. Voldemort is attempting to style himself as a champion for Purebloods at this time. He was before the Wizengamot less than a week ago, speaking to the people who draft our wizarding laws, and advocating a stronger stance against muggles, and the incursion they make on our culture with the influx of muggleborn wizards in positions of authority, both in the Ministry and in our daily life. But while I know Mr Potter promised you action on the arena he can control, I must advise caution in the way we proceed.”

“But sir, don’t you understand? There’s going to be a war in a few very short years if there’s nothing done about it now! We won’t be able to stop Voldemort, and there’s no way to even prevent him from killing everyone because he has horcruxes that anchor him into _this life—_ ”

“A tragedy we, that is to say we the elders and people who should be looking to protect you, must strive to prevent and rectify in good time, Ms Potter,” Dumbledore agreed, though if he was surprised at the mention of Horcruxes, he gave no indication. “I caution against drastic action, Ms Potter, because the situation we are in now is precarious. Time is not as malleable as we think it is, and casting a stone to ripple the surface of a lake only causes ripples for a certain period before the ripples fade into nothingness. Will the lake have changed after? Very likely not, regardless of the size of the stone that you throw. The same with Time. We strive to change things drastically now and Time will find some way to heal itself, letting the ripples flow until the echoes of movement ceases.”

Holly stared incredulously, unable to bring herself to believe that Dumbledore didn’t _want_ to take action against Voldemort, to nip the weed in the bud before it took root, so to speak, but Dumbledore was not done.

“I wonder, Ms Potter, if you’re familiar with the effects of insect life buzzing on the surface of a body of water.”

She frowned, not quite comprehending the strange direction the conversation had taken. “You mean like mosquitoes and will o’ the wisps and fireflies, sir?”

“Yes, exactly. Mosquitoes in the summer, fireflies in the fall, and butterflies and dragonflies in the spring. Perhaps apart from butterflies, we seldom see anything positive that some of these creatures contribute, but did you know that without these insects, the plant and animal life that the lake nurtures would not flourish? Without these insects, your toads and frogs and salamander and flying fish would have a dearth of food supply to keep their populations thriving. And naturally, without these smaller surface dwelling creatures, the larger creatures that dwell deeper in the lake, like the grindylows and the merfolk and even the Giant Squid, would have very little by way of food to nourish them as well. It’s an interconnected ecosystem that cycles food that come from the smallest of creatures to provide nourishment for the greatest of creatures.”

He smiled when Holly still didn’t seem to understand. “Time is like this lake. It seeks to constantly move in the direction that would nurture the creatures that are already in its fold. If you throw a pebble or a stone into the lake, you’ve done nothing but disturb its surface, perhaps displace a small amount of water, but ultimately, nothing has changed. But if you control the insects that buzz over the surface… ah then, you control the population of the small creatures that then control the lives of the larger creatures… This is the caution I advise, Ms Potter. Our actions must not be a pebble hurled into the water, but as meticulous and light as the legs of an insect alighting on the water surface. We intend to nourish Time into a direction that that would be mutually beneficial to all the inhabitants of that lake, not only to the Giant Squid, because it is the largest creature of them all.”

Holly nodded carefully, chewing on Dumbledore’s words. “Yes, sir. I’ll—I’ll be patient and follow Mr Potter’s advice. But I can’t help but ask what _you_ intend to do. You died in my timeline, sir, a senseless and meaningless death, and I can’t—I can’t allow that to happen.”

“I’m sure it would have appeared senseless and meaningless for a young soul so full of fire and life, but to the well-organized mind, death is nothing more than the next great adventure, Holly,” Dumbledore said, and Holly was so forcefully reminded of when he’d said that to her in her first year that she wanted to cry.

She wished there was something more she could say or do to convince Dumbledore that the time for action was now, but she lacked the information and eloquence to inspire great feats. She was just a girl, and these days, not even someone who was old enough to understand the things she’d gone through in the other life she’d led in the future. She didn’t know what she could tell him to stop Voldemort’s rise to power, and she didn’t know what information she could impart that would even be useful, apart from the knowledge of the horcruxes, which she was certainly prepared to give him, and she was sure Dumbledore would, at some point, study and try to take action on it. It wasn’t for her to do _any_ thing about anything, evidently, if both Fleamont and Dumbledore advised her to keep her head down and stay away from the action.

Dumbledore smiled at her a last time before he let her go.

“Oh, and Ms Potter?” he called just before she stepped onto the moving staircase that would lead her back to the corridors. “I must applaud your efforts to school your impressionable minded classmates about their prejudices, though I must once again caution you to remember when it may be too much. Young Mr Black has not had an easy childhood and while he needs to learn to let go of his family’s less than rational beliefs about the purity of magical blood, it would not do for him to put himself in danger over the strength of his convictions, at least not while he is so young.”

Holly stared back at the headmaster. “I don’t intend to let Sirius, or James, or Lily, or anyone else become a martyr for what they believe in, sir. Not again. Not ever.”

“I quite agree, Ms Potter. Ten points to Gryffindor, I think, for knowing the right time to teach life lessons.”

Dumbledore smiled kindly at her as she stepped on the staircase and was whisked back to the empty corridor. It was late, nearing curfew, but Holly took the long way back to Gryffindor Tower, chewing silently on her thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a long and rather cranky A/N typed up to address some of the questions I've gotten about Lily and Sirius and Holly, but the Author Notes character limitation is cramping my style so if you'd like answers to the following questions, then you can head over [here](https://mumufic.tumblr.com/post/645607425014153216/my-ranty-author-notes-to-address-questions-on-my) where I lay everything out:
> 
>   1. Why is Lily so stupid / obtuse / blind about Snape? 
>   2. Why is Sirius spouting the bigotry he vehemently disavowed in OoTP? And why did he call Holly a mudblood? 
>   3. Why is Holly so stupidly letting so many details from her timeline out to her friends? 
>   4. Why aren’t you patching up any of these inconsistencies that multiple people have already pointed out? 
> 

> 
> Also, don't look too closely into what Dumbledore is saying in this chapter. The truth is, I just don't know how to write him lmao so you get mumbo jumbo metaphors that don't make sense. Suffice it to say it made sense in my head lol.


End file.
